


Earthquake Weather

by leslielol



Series: Mode & Moment [4]
Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Domestic, Established Relationship, Family, Hospitalization, M/M, Major Character Injury, Meeting the Parents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-30 21:38:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 254,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8550043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leslielol/pseuds/leslielol
Summary: Carisi has only ever known family as a thing that expands, that commands greater attention and fills exponentially with more bodies and greater warmth. Barba has only ever seen his family contract, and in that he has found the divine pleasure of intimacy. 
In considering one another’s place in those existing realms, Barba and Carisi struggle to give up old ideas and embrace the new. 
It’s a story about family, y’all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All hail slashy/slash--y, patron saint of sanity.
> 
> In light of recent events……...... I cannot yet _begin_ to even _attempt_ to manage my grief, anger, shame, and disappointment. My country took a look at white supremacy in human form and thought, yes, that’ll do nicely. If you voted for that racist gasbag or likewise cast some third party vote out of your asshole, you can fuck right off. This is not for you. You deserve to live in the desolate, joyless wasteland you’ve decided to create. This is my little attempt at normalcy, a breath of relief and silly fun as the important-- _exhausting_ \--work of maintaining the lives, sanity, and wellness of American minorities and marginalized groups begins. 
> 
> I mean. _Fuck._

Barba read faces like a language. He studied the curving script in drawn brows and set jaws. There were dialects enough that he might spend a lifetime learning them all, but like _love_ and _hatred_ and _fear_ and _longing,_ the sentiment of _guilty_ was universally known. He studied a repeating series of it now, in the faces of the jury. Theirs was a slow procession, finally met. 

Glancing behind him into the gallery, Barba spied Benson and Fin, who saw what he saw, and were satisfied. 

While the verdict was read, Barba was admittedly gone to another headspace. He considered his next case, one he was already in the midst of, despite delaying tactics from the defense. Tomorrow would see a brief hearing at nine, and barring any surprises, he could then settle into the material with gusto. 

In twenty minutes, he was back in his office, shelving this matter and taking on the next. 

The coffee in his deskside set-up was cold, but he poured the last dregs of it into a cup all the same, salvaged it with milk and sugar, and threw it back. Sparing his tongue most of the taste, it hit the back of his throat and drained down. Barba held off the grimace the concoction so resoundingly deserved, and settled into a pile of paperwork. He had more than enough matters to hold a grudge against, and coffee was only ever a minor offender. 

Presently, Barba was angry with no fewer than three judges, a law clerk, and as for defense attorneys--he’d stopped counting. Engagement in--and perhaps worse, _entertainment of_ \--lowly legal tactics tested his mettle. He stood the antics until he’d positioned himself to conquer them, though oftentimes it hardly seemed worth the battle. 

He played the game himself, so there was a level of muck to account for, but he felt lately like he’d sunken down past his waist and was sloughing through it. 

Yet, there was nothing substantial to hang his ill-feelings on--no personal or professional failings, no egregious court losses, even. His unprecedented winning streak continued, either by verdict or dealings. Maintaining his gold standard felt more of a necessity _now_ than after the assault in his home and the court case that arose from it. Then, he had something for which to account. 

_Now,_ he had to make it look easy. 

And if Barba permitted it of himself, and shoulder the weight of his own efforts, he could look into the hearts and minds of others and see what it was he was lacking in their estimation. There was much to learn from their quick dismissals, nevermind if they were rooted in any truth, or simply strewn uselessly in a heap. The worst he’d faced before was the insinuation that he was a _mincing coward_ for going after police officers. 

Today, the whole of his reputation was on the line. 

His objectivity and ethical acuity were thrown into question--rightfully, to some degree. Fraternization within the realm of his work wasn’t uncommon, but those who engaged normally had the good sense to keep quiet. But then, silence for the sake of an affair wasn’t an option. 

It did not answer for what Barba was doing.

So rather than deny it, Barba took the necessary steps to see those doubts were answered. He realized after the fact that he might as well have not bothered; those who would have opinions about such a thing still held them, and were unmoved. 

The dignity he had for the office, now, had to be proven, because none would again assume it. 

Such was Barba’s estimation, anyway. Carisi was convinced that--six months out--it was _only_ Barba worrying after these things. _All the better,_ Barba thought, but refused to slow his hustle. He would not find peace in complacency; that simply was not him.

He supposed-- _maybe_ \--he was confusing muck with the snow mounting outside on the sidewalks and curbs. Maybe that was his struggle, and nothing else.

Maybe he was only remorseful that the skies seemed to darken just as soon as they lit up, and he hadn’t seen the golden afternoon sunlight spill through Carisi’s hair in _ages._

The grudges he held--they weren’t all work-related. Sometimes, a man had to curse the axial tilt of the earth itself.

Barba was lifted from his thoughts by a presence at his office door. There was no announcing knock, which first gave him hope towards familiarity. However, when he caught a whiff of oily cologne, his hopes quickly sank into the dark depths of reality. His was boorish company, over-familiar only due to lack of tact.

“Barba. Working late?”

“No,” Barba answered--it couldn’t be after six, yet. He lifted his pen from his notepad all the same, and raised a questioning eyebrow for his guest. “Are you?”

A sharper man might have taken offense. That wasn’t Defense Attorney Myers by a long shot.

“My client’s alibi,” Myers said, producing a flimsy, two-page report from his briefcase. 

“They never said justice was thorough,” Barba quipped. 

“What?”

Barba ignored him and accepted the report. 

“A citation of drunk and disorderly conduct, how charming.” Barba smirked while reading through the text. The timeline was still off, but it was worth considering. “I’ll tell the assigned detective.”

“Yeah, just roll over in bed.”

In a moment that seemed to first rattle out of his chest cavity before settling between himself and his visitor, Barba cracked a bright, impenetrable smile. Coolly, he said, “If I were sleeping with them all, maybe. But it’s not like the intern pool, Counselor. I have to be discriminating, or else settle a lawsuit with their parents.”

Myers left without so much as a huffed response. 

Gossip worked both ways. 

At least there was this: comments became less sharp, or else Barba’s toughened exterior had blunted them. That they should persist did not surprise him--gossip was new to someone, sometime--but he’d have hoped he wouldn’t be touched by words _at all._ He’d had a lifetime to become deaf to crude lines. It didn’t seem fair to have all his hard work undone in recent months. There was always some new dig that inexplicably found a soft spot between his ribs, and he flashed hot before delivering an icy response. 

Not _this one,_ certainly. 

Myers couldn’t make a sharp argument if he was handed a stack of stenciled words and a pair of scissors to cut them out.

Once alone, Barba pushed away from his desk. He was poised to stand and abruptly leave, but never progressed past the inclination. He sank back into his head, and inched forward. 

_Back to work,_ said the hunched line of his shoulders.

From the hard line of his lips, _It doesn’t matter._

His glare traveled the surface of his desk, and only softened when it hit upon a glossy framed photo. With Carisi smiling back at him, Barba once again set his pen to paper, his thoughts to the law, and resolved to _so thoroughly_ win this case that Myers wouldn’t eat his words so much as _choke on them._

Such was his only outlet. Barba had long-since given up on communicating these instances to Carisi, even through idle conversation. Carisi took it all to heart, was open and earnest in even the worst ways. Everything he offered of himself, he took from others. It wasn’t a fair trade when Carisi offered goodness, honesty, and a hot meal, and was bilked in return. When stacked up against the younger man’s well-being, Barba saw the comments for what they were: short-sighted slights, nothing so damning, nothing _so great_ as to merit sharing, as they would ultimately only cause Carisi undue hurt while alleviating nothing of Barba’s own. 

Barba lost another hour to his work, and anticipated losing still more, but was distracted by a string of texts from Carisi. They were innocuous--mostly. 

_[u still at the office?]_

_[it’s snowing!]_

_[leftovers tonight or??]_

Carisi didn’t even have to ask. By the power of suggestion alone, Barba knew _his_ night was over, and theirs was beginning. 

_[I’m finishing up. Meet me here in twenty, share a cab?]_

He’d become a sap, and should hate himself for it, but Carisi made that particular burden easy to bear. For Barba, there was reward enough in rolling his eyes, sweetening his smile, and meeting Carisi at a compromise. They were simple things, all: coffees pressed into his empty hand at a moment’s notice, kisses stolen on harried mornings, or more generous exchanges on those that lingered like heavy stormclouds between dawn and an afternoon. Single conversations that spanned days because nothing like necessity held them to polite convention. There was a strange new freedom to be had in a lover: the promise of time. 

Privately, Barba thought things couldn’t be better. 

Publicly--and it was nothing if not that--there were still some hurdles to jump. 

Carisi admitted to that which Barba would not: he still got some grief from others. The usual perpetrators were cops outside his unit, or else he heard worse said about him and Barba both. It bothered him, still, and he seemed confounded that the animosity did not simply _stop_ after he faced it, that the hurt didn’t ease, and his pride didn’t toughen and scar over to the point that nothing could again touch it. 

Clearly, he’d looked to Barba for example. Barba didn’t have to explain that life wasn’t like that for everyone. Carisi would get there on his own soon enough.

Nonetheless, there were arresting moments of brightness: Carisi had found fast friends in GOAL, New York’s Gay Officers Action League, where he derived a new sense of place and purpose. 

The group also gave him fertile new grounds from which to grow a level of camaraderie. Blossoming, too, was some genuine wonderment, given the first impression he’d shared with Barba was, “There are a lotta gay cops. _A lotta gay cops._ ” 

(Barba still smiled when he recalled Carisi’s boundless excitement after his first meeting there, where he’d been told he could help carry the banner at Pride--if he wanted--and that they let the newcomers have the first opportunity; it wasn’t a matter of seniority. Somehow that was novel, and well before any of the useful services they provided, Carisi thought to share that.) 

Barba, ever steeped in a more bleak-- _realistic_ \--outlook of things, believed they were often reaching for these moments, or otherwise accepted what was passable for what was grand. Carisi was convinced otherwise. He claimed there was a wealth of them, good and bad, and before they were moments or choices, they were opportunities, first. Each and every one. 

Barba could stand to manage fewer _opportunities._

He glanced at his phone and was surprised by the hour, day, and month, collectively. Summer had escaped him, and fall snuck off soon after. Winter arrived early in their stead, and by December all of New York was paying for it.

Papers gathered into their respective folders and lined neatly in his briefcase, Barba ducked out of his office, coat still in his arms rather than around his shoulders. He was the picture of winter-readiness by the time the elevator delivered him to the main floor, and he stepped lightly through the heavy doors leading towards the courthouse steps. 

They were wet, dusted white with the day’s most recent snow flurry. Carisi stood among them, the sole figure daring to face an open sky, rather than crowd along the building itself as commuters awaited their rides. Clouds of breath and smoke alike huddled over their forms, and Barba supposed maybe the latter was reason enough for Carisi--who was always _trying_ to drop the habit--to keep his distance. 

More broadly, Barba was not surprised. Carisi did this at every opportunity. He sought out the bright cold and pleasing snow flurries, and repeatedly made his case thusly: _I’ve got to enjoy it now, before it makes me miserable._

And it was true: New York was beautiful under a winter sky. Buildings and bridges seemed to disappear into it, surrendering their forms to the shapeless cloud cover and ghostly cascades of snow, submerging themselves _literally_ under the weather. To appreciate that view before the snow took on the grey-brown stink of the City’s preoccupations was wise. Once the sewers and streets and tunnels got ahold of it, beauty was gone. 

The City’s inhabitants, thankfully, lasted much longer. 

Barba strolled right up to Carisi--announcing himself was hardly a thing he shied away from in any respect--who met him with a smile Barba did not return.

“What’s that.”

Carisi followed his line of sight to his flat cap. 

“What? I’ve got style.”

“I’m sure you could trade an old witch three magic beans for some. But what’s _that._ ” 

“No, you love it. It’s distinguished.”

“You look like an old man,” Barba insisted, and started down the courthouse steps alongside Carisi. There were taxis moving slow along the curb, waiting to be picked off by tired civil servants bemoaning the dark skies that found them even in the early evening hours. 

Carisi released a hand from his jacket pocket and let it move thoughtlessly to the center of Barba’s back. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d likely feel through several layers, but the simple weight assured by his presence alone was enough to serve Carisi’s purpose. 

“Cool. We can turn that whole ‘daddy’ thing on its head.”

Barba stopped dead in his tracks. 

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think I just had a minor stroke. _Daddy thing?”_

Carisi turned, gave Barba a smart look, something sharp enough to stand up against the dull haze of night. 

During winter in New York, the sky turned blue and stayed that way. Inky black skies were never a known entity in the city, but nothing was more eerily, more heavily, decidedly _blue_ than a winter night. The effect it had on buildings made them flatter, as though it could cut their corners and render them less three-dimensional. The effect it had on people was even greater. 

People said things, sometimes because the cold and the dark and all the hunched walking left them in want of human contact. There was shock value in being honest. And sometimes, people merely said what they meant in a rush of necessity-- _anything_ to get out of the cold. 

Some lower court might have labeled it a passing means of interrogation.

Barba wouldn’t entertain the notion--or its effects--for a second. The set expression on his face said as much, and Carisi scrambled for an answer. 

“Not _really._ It’s just something my sister Gina said. I don’t even think about you bein’ older.”

“You do,” Barba corrected. He recalled Carisi’s interest in Barba’s younger years at Harvard, in particular, wherein Carisi never lacked for want of stories or photographic evidence. “In fact, you distinctly think about me being _younger._ ”

Carisi made another face. The cold had it out for him, and even the brim of his flat cap could not shield his shame. Barba took a few swift steps and was soon streetlevel, clear of the steps and well ahead of Carisi.

“What? Come on. No. I wouldn’t even want to date a twenty-something.”

“Oh, pfft, me neither.” Barba raised his hand for a cab, and stopped one short of circling the block again. Barba held the door for Carisi to enter first. “But, for the record--do you know any?”

The teasing and joking--along with the shared cab and single address given--were their new normal. Like the constant barrage of snow flurries, it found them at every turn. 

Domesticity, Barba thought, suited winter. If ever two people should share a life, it would be best to do so through the unbearable cold and debilitating silence of a city under siege. They should stand flush to the corners of those shrinking buildings, and follow their example.

Proving himself to be a student of this method, Carisi tossed an arm easily across Barba’s shoulders the moment they met in the back of the cab. 

“Nice scarf, by the way,” Carisi offered, smiling crookedly at the visibly soft dove-grey of the garment.

Barba was not so easily cowed. “If you say it matches my hair I might just cry.”

Carisi rolled his eyes. “So, wow, work today, let me tell you--”

“I’m sorry, was that previous discussion anywhere _near_ resolved?” 

Carisi had the gall to look betrayed by the interruption. He insisted: “I said _Gina_ said it. That’s the whole thing wrapped up in crazy and thrown out of a moving train. Which, by the way, brings me back to what happened when I started my shift…”

Barba let it slide. Intentions and deeds mattered; optics were a thing of the past. Such was the hardline Carisi had taken, anyway, and espoused with all the frequency and ease of a campaign slogan. He felt the need to champion what they had, even above the simple fact of having it. Barba said nothing to this point--he’d been of a similar mind, once. Youth, inexperience, and a combative audience made him all the more demonstrative and vocal. He was adamant in saying those things he thought people did not wish to hear, and for as self-possessed it made him feel in the short term, Barba regretted turning his own interests into a cause. 

But human nature was on his side, and those who were embarrassed for him quickly forgot, and those who despised him despised him still. And when Barba overcompensated with a bleak and silent turn, those who loved him would forgive him. 

He suspected Carisi would quiet down--like he’d done--when he grew tired with the pushback, and found peace enough in his own mind, and comfort enough in their bed.

So rather than letting himself get swept up in Carisi’s rallying cry, Barba suffered through the over-involved introductions to friends, the suspicions Carisi had about waiters (this, despite Barba’s insistence that they were the city’s most jaded sub-group of laborers, and nothing in their deadened stares was personal), and so many coupled selfies Barba essentially had a catalogue of his daily wears.

Where Carisi got it right--surprisingly--was work. They shared parting smiles and the occasional lunch, but professionalism was their first and last benchmark, met and returned to so as to be met again. Barba supposed this was for his benefit, because he’d never been subtle with his concerns about how their coupling looked from afar. Carisi was perceptive enough to bypass the offer of an explanation, and simply deny a foundation from which the insidious doubts of others could build.

If there was joy to be had, it would find them: drinks with colleagues remained a regular occurrence, and generally tame, unless Carisi freewheeled it with his drink order simply because he had a guaranteed ride home. 

Of all that could still sting, it was embarrassment on Barba’s behalf for ever doubting their coming out, or questioning its worth. The looks Carisi shot to and received from Rollins were proof enough he needed a confidant, and delighted in having one. 

While they brought little of their lives to work, work nevertheless seemed to charge home ahead of them, get there first, and make itself comfortable. 

For a time, that intrusion felt unavoidable, even natural. There were even instances where it worked to their advantage, as post-coital chats turned into genuine brainstorming sessions over cases. But it was draining to keep a thing so ugly so close, and Carisi in particular set ground rules for engagement. It was _Barba,_ whose mind and attentions could flip like a switch, who needed the most schooling in this area. Carisi’s best mode of defense was a simple string of lightly-driven _nope, nope, nope_ s made between teasing kisses. 

As far as discouragement was concerned, it admittedly wasn’t the best tactic. 

From the cab’s toasty interior, the city lights seemed to be dulled by the cold outside, then scattered by the streams of exhaust and heat spilling out of buildings and stalled vehicles. What spilled into the cab softened Carisi's features, and Barba felt like he was being spoken to by a personified lullaby. The face matched the words: sweet, dreary, and warm. Barba wanted very much to tuck into his partner, to rest a head on his shoulder and draw both arms around his middle, and simply pour his weight against this man, unique in his ability and desire to bear it. 

But that wasn't behavior becoming of a patron of any of form of public transportation, so Barba simply listened, and smiled, and imagined all that he could do when they arrived at his apartment. 

Carisi mentioned Yusuf, the City prosecutor to whom Carisi delivered cases when he was made the lead detective. A thing, Carisi was quite pleased to report, that had occurred three times in the last month. 

Carisi acknowledged the man’s methodical approach--praised it, even--but added sheepishly, “...Even if it sometimes feels like a refresher course.”

“You’re not so far out of law school to need refreshing,” Barba noted, but kept his tone level.

Carisi waved a hand, dismissing any suggestion that he didn’t like working with the man. “He’s kind of a natural teacher. Right? Or, I dunno, maybe he thinks he needs to explain stuff to me.”

Barba smirked. Carisi’s concern that someone might be talking down to him was exactly as Barba suspected, though it was unfounded. “No, you were right the first time. He likes to talk through his thought process.”

Carisi sank comically against Barba’s shoulder, feigning a relief that left him physically weak. 

“Oh, thank God.”

Barba reached around to pat the cheek Carisi didn't have resting against him. It was still cool to the touch, a chill Barba wanted immediately to remedy by his own hand. 

“No one’s forgotten you’ve passed the Bar, Sonny. Least of all the law community.”

Barba felt the draw in Carisi’s cheek as he smiled. He felt a dimple forge itself like the unexpected crack of a bullet into stone. 

He said, “I bet I keep them up at night.”

Barba didn’t take the bait. He clicked his tongue against his teeth and tutted, “Mm. No, that’s too easy. Pass.”

“But I had, like, the best rejoinder.” 

“Fine,” Barba sighed.

“No, you gotta--” Carisi, still wearing a smile, started from the top. “I bet I keep them up at night.”

“You certainly keep _me_ up at night.”

“Yeah, you look like shit.”

_“What?”_ Barba blurted out, the cool steel of his voice thrown now into as little shape as foam insulation. To hear his voice climb high and fracture was a habit of his Barba loathed; he could corral his posture and school his expressions, but gave himself away with his voice at the least opportune moments. At his worst--when Barba wholly loses himself to a bout of deafening anxiety--he stumbles over his words, which only adds insult to injury. 

“That’s it? That’s your line? That was _awful._ Fuck you.”

“You wanna?” Carisi asked, eyes shining. He grinned as realization--and utter _contempt_ \--unfolded across Barba’s face. Barba gave an impressive roll of his eyes while Carisi boasted, “I’m always playing the long game.”

When Barba said nothing, Carisi poked a finger against his cheek, as if he could coax out a smile.

Petty above all else, Barba coolly retrieved his phone from his coat pocket and began skimming through e-mails. 

“I know you’re laughing on the inside. I know you, Barba. You’re loving this.” 

Barba held his tongue, and typed an incoherent message out on his phone, if only to distract himself from Carisi’s proximity and offer. There wasn’t a thing Barba could do to answer for either in the back of a cab. 

Carisi prodded him again, and Barba could not let idle teasing get out ahead of his pride.

“It'll be an interesting story,” Barba mused at last. 

“What's that?” Carisi asked, practically giddy with anticipation. 

“How you lost your finger.”

There was an indifference in Barba’s delivery that sparked in Carisi a trained response, a kind of threat assessment upon his own person and the situation in which he found himself. Admittedly, Barba posed no threat, but the ease with which he leveled the insinuation stalled Carisi before it thrilled him. Once met with the whole sentiment, he laughed--a great, goofy air horn of a noise that fast tapered off into a more tolerable snicker.

Carisi ducked his head slightly and pitched his voice to match. “What if I told you it was a limited-time offer?”

It was the only card he had at hand, because keeping cool was Barba’s play. When Carisi chanced a game, he habitually lost. 

But this was an ace palmed nice and warm in his care. Carisi traced the well-worn corners, so buffed not by labor or a sense of duty, but by delight. The deed--when Carisi found himself fit to do it--carried itself with all the daring of a tightrope walk, and finished with gasping exultation. Barba had put him through a marathon effort, and Carisi came away invigorated, laughing for lack of words to describe his pleasure. And when he fell quiet and considered the ache in his body and the warmth pooling inside of him at depths he had never fathomed, Carisi did feel regret. Here was something he’d never tried for fear of what it meant he wasn’t. 

Those thoughts fell to the wayside when, as he’d turned gingerly onto his side, Carisi found that among all the things he no longer was, _alone_ topped the list. 

From that point, their sexual relationship changed. It took on features that seemed--on their faces--diametrically opposed: stronger and looser, like two slacks of rope gathered and knotted. 

Barba scarcely remembered a time Carisi didn’t want to be held or fucked--and even then, very rarely one without the other. So when Carisi even teased the matter, Barba knew better than to doubt its validity. 

He pursed his lips. The cab was warm, with heat spooled in awkwardly at their feet by rubber hosing. Barba didn’t blink at the contraption--neither did Carisi. There was little that should surprise them about their City. 

“Just here,” Barba told the cab driver, who’d approached a street narrowed due to construction. Barba paid the fare and followed Carisi onto the sidewalk, where the cold and grit from debris hit them like a coordinated assault. 

_“Yes,”_ Barba said, exasperated. It was beyond his sensibilities to give Carisi a straight answer in public. To him, a taxi constituted that much. 

“Such a gentleman,” Carisi teased.

Their hands found one another fast, like two blocks in solitary distinction was too great a thing to ask of them. When the moment struck, even seconds creaked by like the passage of centuries. 

“I’m still not used to this,” Carisi said, his voice distant and quiet. Barba caught a glimpse of him under the orange glow of a streetlight, and he looked impossibly youthful. Like an actor in his prime, revisited by adoring millions for his first, best film. His face--as it was then--would be how people thought of him best. It was a strange stroke of misfortune to make an identity for oneself just one second shy of the moment that the rest of the world makes one of you.

“Hand-holding?”

Carisi snorted. Of course Barba’s instincts were right, but it was embarrassing being seen so clearly when practiced discretion and aloofness were his profession. So Carisi took a turn, and obfuscated what it was Barba already knew. 

“The cold. The dark. Winter. It’s been forever!”

“Some might even say a year,” Barba said dryly. 

“The Lieu said you were great in court today,” Carisi told him, again changing subjects. “Wish I could have been there.”

“It wasn’t your case, and I’m not a circus performer. You can’t just come and watch the show.” 

“I _get that,_ but can you sympathize with me a minute? I missed you. All day.” He said this with great weight, as if his past twelve hours had more bearing on the world than most. Admittedly--to Barba--they did. 

Sulkily, Carisi added, “You’ve been busy.”

They reached Barba’s apartment building, and their respective grips on one another loosened as they parted ways. Carisi held the door while Barba collected his keys--a bit of collective footwork that sang like choreography. They took the elevator, both brushing the snow from their shoulders and hair. 

“Is this about lunch? Deputy Chief Dodds asked me along on a meeting with opposing counsel in the Cains case. I thought it’d be a half hour at _most,_ and then he spied a few City Councillors dining with the Mayor and it became a whole _thing…_ ”

Barba waved a dismissing hand. It seemed to complement the roll of Carisi’s eyes. 

“I know, I know. Everybody wants a piece of you.” 

Carisi inched up close behind Barba as he set about unlocking the door to his apartment. Carisi put a hand on Barba’s side, and fit the other along the crook of Barba’s elbow, as if he intended to offer guidance. He leaned forward, pressing his front to Barba’s backside with the hope of offending Barba with his presumption, and ultimately sparking the man’s combative streak. Barba sank back ever so slightly, and met Carisi’s form with his own, answering Carisi’s crude gesture with one corralled by his good sense, and slathered in seeming nonchalance. 

Carisi continued, his voice thick as molasses, “I get it. I just want my slice.” 

Then, when Barba didn’t reply, Carisi pressed: “Really, _nothing?_ I practically set that up for you.”

“I won’t validate your terrible jokes,” Barba answered primly.

“‘Well here’s a prime cut.’ It was right there. Nothing to _validate,_ I’ve seen it.” 

Defeated, Carisi dropped his head against Barba’s shoulder, where there was warmth enough along Barba’s throat, but freezing bits of snow and ice in his hair. Carisi took them both, breathed deep, and considered the result an even success. He was all strong, heady scents: his smooth cologne, the slightly dampened wool of his coat, the ghostly air of hours-old coffee (this, even before Barba partook of it) on his breath. 

The whole package stole Carisi’s attention, then gripped it tight like the mind’s occupation with a promise. Barba was--at last--a familiar scent. Even in passing, Carisi could lose himself to a swell of the man’s being. It was a cup he could sip from once and be sated through an even the most tedious of shifts. The very air that Barba passed through seemed to hold his essence just a moment longer than it afforded most others. 

It was a _spectacular_ coincidence. 

Once, Carisi told Barba of his findings, and Barba laughed at him, said casually, _Idiot. Have you never been in love before?_ and did not regret it.

Still, Carisi summoned what little fight he had left in him and huffed, “This relationship is so one-sided.” 

“You poor thing,” Barba drawled. 

“I’m dating you for your wit, you know.”

“And I’m dating you for your body. Lucky us, there’s no overlap.”

Barba walked inside ahead of Carisi, and though he did not turn back around to confirm it, he did not doubt the goofy grin spread wide across Carisi’s features. 

His apartment was a warm welcome after the cold, dark day. If he stalled in the doorway just a moment longer than necessary, Carisi did not realize it. Nor did he take to heart Barba’s careful unwrapping of his scarf and shrugging off of his coat with a gaze not thrown idly about, but focused, searing into the expanse of his home.

Sometimes, Barba felt compelled to take stock of all that he had. Beyond the furnishings and space, there was a greater appeal to his home. That lived-in quality that touched the cushions in his couch too gamely and routinely misplaced the remote was not one Barba had expected to tolerate, let alone embrace. And yet, he took ample satisfaction in the fact that every space made for Carisi’s inclusion was met with hushed delight and artful filling. 

Carisi’s best suits made it into a small corner of Barba’s splendid walk-in closet, so whenever he stayed the night, Carisi looked great leaving, and bore no signs of a harried morning routine lacking for the necessary or the supplemental things, any and all. When extra razors or a spare phone charger simply appeared at the precise moment Carisi discovered the need, Barba played none the wiser. 

_(“I’ve always had that,”_ Barba once dismissed of a Samsung charger.

_Carisi did not believe him for a second, but said only, “I bet it comes in real handy with your iPhone 6s.”)_

That the tidiness and sharp, purpose-driven lines of his preferred aesthetic suffered mattered little. Barba liked to pick up the scattered, errant things that were so abundantly Carisi’s--a well-loved book of esoteric essays bookmarked by a three-week-old section of newspaper with an article Carisi still meant to read--and turn them over in his hands, and better understand them. And he had substantial evidence to suggest Carisi did the same: misplaced titles in his Vonnegut collection--there was something pleasing, Barba thought, about seeing a man’s work in linear succession, and here Carisi had gone and mucked up the timeline, a regular Billy Pilgrim--were chief among the disturbances, but there were others. A dishtowel where one had never been, chrome gadgets in his kitchen drawers that seemed almost alien in their design, and a disturbingly large assortment of wooden spoons. 

Each was a brick fit snugly in his new home, itself built with time and genuine effort, and _fortified,_ too, not by security systems and safety measures--though Barba did not skimp on either--but chiefly in the fact that it was a shared space. 

A dwelling, not a cell. 

In it, Carisi was a recognizable presence, a known entity even when his work kept him away for days on end. When he turned up--as he always did--he was met by a doorman who knew his name. 

These were ideals, not changes. Barba met them with great swells of pride that he could walk around with all day, drawing on their warmth when the cold of an absent body proved too great. 

Nothing in his apartment was known with such acclaim as these small tokens of another living person, unique and absurd and _stubborn_ in ways Barba did not yet know. Chanced meetings or planned nights were controlled substances. By inviting even pieces of Carisi into his home, Barba knew he was fast hooked on the man, and would entertain anything of him.

Addictions were, after all, the most pleasing when even the ardent denials of their power were understood as a farce. The lie was as desired as the truth. 

“I’m not hungry,” Carisi announced, as if he alone felt answerable to his own earlier suggestion of a meal. It was hardly what Barba would call subtle; Carisi might as well have shelved his hands on his hips and looked down towards his true intentions. 

“The man who spent a taxi ride asking if I wanted to fuck is suddenly being coy,” Barba hummed. He played off his piquing interest for bemusement. 

Carisi curled a hand around Barba’s hip, thumb sliding up under the sharp line of his vest so as to graze the cool fixture of a suspender snap. 

Until the day that he died and for the whole of eternity that carried on after, Carisi was _absolutely certain_ that he would never tire of flirting with Barba. The man would in turns huff, smile, return fire, or preen under Carisi’s hands, his words, as slick or as fumbled as he could render them. In some respects, Carisi knew he was making up for lost time. His efforts to flirt with men could be named on one hand, and even then--a majority fell in the realm of effectively--if questionably--doing his job. 

But quite simply, he loved to stir passionless resentment in Barba, to make him guffaw at a particularly awful phrase or moronic gesture. The man did not laugh or come apart so easily, but he gave heaps of beautiful face when prompted by those overly tender, sickeningly dear, and _entirely genuine_ things Carisi took such pleasure in saying to him. 

“You gonna issue me a demerit or are you gonna do something about it?”

“I’m going to consider the high price of appeasement,” Barba countered. “You’ll be insufferable.”

And while his tone was stern, he did nothing to stop the encroaching fingers spreading warm against his middle.

“I miss you,” was Carisi’s counterargument. He said it first plainly, and then again amidst a slow succession of kisses, each dangling on the performance of the last. Though Carisi started at Barba’s lips, he was ever the explorer: Barba’s cheeks and brow were next, and his throat as soon as Carisi took the initiative of undressing his partner. Barba made an equally brash move in allowing it.

“You miss being on vacation,” Barba said, and wordlessly added, _When we did **this** every day._

Carisi didn’t deny it. He worked open another button on Barba’s vest. It was a smooth line down the front of the man, securing him nicely through three pieces into a whole being. The fit--once exquisitely tailored, occasionally to Barba’s own detriment--now had a touch more give to it. Barba was far from swimming in his suits, but he’d lost weight. It left his features more angular and pronounced, his middle firmer than it had ever been soft. Carisi placed the change nearer the time of the threats against Barba’s life and the trial that named them as criminal. 

He dropped his hands to Barba’s waist as he worked the final buttons, and before drawing the garment off the man’s broad shoulders, roamed gladly in search of what _was_ there for him to glorify, handle, and partake in. 

“I know you miss me, too,” he said, sheer pleasure throwing light into his eyes and demanding a sharp glint of teeth. 

The evidence was clear: Barba had left work for Carisi, gone home with him instead of out for a quick bite on his own--a regular and genuine preference--and even sacrificed a pinch of pride in the taxi cab for entertaining Carisi’s antics. It wasn’t _Say Anything_ levels of outspoken adoration, but it _was_ more than Barba could say he’d done for any past lover. 

And Carisi knew this. 

And he pushed--sometimes--to see it, because there was no greater vision than Barba biting back annoyance, only to have it quickly disappear on him altogether, and for the man to blink, brow furrowed in quiet contemplation after something--he was never so quick as to guess what--had left him. To see Barba experience a moment of peace, and for that moment to _overtake all else_ was Carisi’s greatest joy.

He found he did not witness it nearly enough. 

A pocketed phone buzzed between them, and given their proximity, it was a wild guess as to who should answer for it.

“Is that you or me?” Carisi asked while never once taking his mouth off Barba’s skin, as if he was starved for the sweat-salt of it all.

“Me,” Barba said, wrenching the thing from his pants pocket and glancing at the screen.

“Shit. Is it work?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Barba said with every measure of assurance. His lifted his gaze to meet Carisi’s like a promise. 

“You look tired again,” Carisi observed without explicitly meaning to do so aloud. Nothing escaped Barba concerning his own appearance, but something had to be said for the dark circles cradling the man’s green eyes, themselves always a delightful surprise pitched bright against his warm skin and darker coloring. 

Particularly bugged, too, or set like those of a small, otherwise flat-faced dog. Carisi didn’t make the same mistake in saying so, but he liked all the surrounding connotations: Barba was observant to a fault, but hardly subtle about it. It was as though his own features got out ahead of his instincts, and lent themselves to the cause of being a know-it-all, and _looking like one._

Carisi swept his thumbs along the soft peak of Barba’s cheeks, and though he _tried_ to look Barba in the eyes, his attention slipped, tumbled to the man’s winter-pinched lips.

“When was the last time you really slept, huh?”

“When did you last let me?” Barba asked. His tone was sharp so as to cut right to his point, but he was smiling. 

Carisi answered him with another swell of kisses. These were none too sweet, but hungry and daring and messy. Carisi’s hands slipped from where they’d gently cupped Barba’s cheeks so that one moved to curl around the man’s throat, the other slid much further south. Carisi felt Barba’s heavy pulse against the palm of his hand, a prominent fixture so near that Carisi imagined he could grab hold of and silence.

Or better yet, _taste._

Carisi ventured there. With his mouth unoccupied, Barba sighed, as if Carisi’s displays annoyed him more than they thrilled him. 

The notion alone was impossible; there was _nothing_ more thrilling than being adored. 

All the same, Barba wanted to hurry things along to the main event. Carisi’s suggestion in the taxi did not rattle idly throughout his mind so much as occupy it entirely, and press painfully against the backs of his eyes as he imagined it: twisting limbs and anchoring grips. The impossible spread of Carisi’s knees. The curve of his ass and arch of his back--all of it, the boundless real estate Barba had to work with.

He could feed on memories, now, and not fantasies, though the two felt inextricably linked.

“I don’t know who gave you the idea that there should be double the hours in a day if you’re trying to spend it with someone else,” Barba muttered, then tried not to gasp as Carisi sucked and tongued mercilessly along his collarbone. 

“I just think it’s only fair.” 

Carisi was two pink suspender straps down and four buttons into Barba’s shirt--there, only after a brief detour to the man’s trousers, where he’d anticipated the need to unzip Barba’s trousers as soon as he groped his middle--when Barba wrapped his hand around Carisi’s wrist, halting further progress. 

“You first,” Barba said, then smirked ahead of Carisi’s easy taunt.

“You mean _you first,_ ” Carisi whined, but surrendered his play all the same.

He emptied his hands of Barba, and was not lacking for long; Barba placed his hands on Carisi and led with new purpose, giving him everything it was he might have been missing. 

Barba made quick work of Carisi’s clothes, moving and undressing and stepping firmly into space so as to usher their proceedings to the bedroom. His was a more practiced set of moves--all footwork, learned and performed. Carisi was a rapt audience and an eager partner, happy to follow.

Perhaps there was some sleight-of-hand involved, too, because by the time Carisi hit the bed, Barba had somehow made Carisi’s clothes disappear. 

Carisi got this much in return: Barba’s knee fixed between Carisi’s own to pitch himself up, over the man, and Barba’s weight, tilted and held back so that Carisi only got a taste when their chests met as they leaned into one another with their whole bodies. Groins and bellies and mouths met even, and fit nicely besides. 

Then Barba stole his breath again, and kissed off the man’s lips with a growl that stirred a giggle out of Carisi. Any humor died on his lips as he watched as Barba sank lower and lower down his body. He only saw a head of hair, a quirk of the eyebrows, and a ferocious glint in a pair of shining green eyes before he felt Barba’s mouth on him. 

“Oh God, oh _God…_ ” 

“Praying for mercy?” 

Carisi wasn’t sure if he heard the words at all, or merely imagined that’s what Barba would say. Regardless of how full his mouth was, he could always eek out a sly word.

Barba’s phone buzzed again with the arrival of another text. Both men ignored it. 

His hands--still cold--were readily occupied in their slow procession up and down the insides of Carisi’s thighs. He was not about to surrender his hold there--and the flesh, promise, and opportunity it granted him--for something as pedestrian as a phone.

In apparent response to his preoccupation, Barba received yet _another_ text, and then, like an evil summoned by their carelessness, the next interruption arrived at their doorstep as a knock at the apartment door.

“Goddamnit,” Barba sighed, and Carisi had never had his dick sworn at before. 

Barba pulled off and away, wiping the drool and wet from his mouth with the back of his hand. He hated to leave a job undone, but nor would he consign his reputation to the shoddy workmanship inherent in the name of a quickie.

He then released his hold on Carisi entirely to address his open fly. Cold air filled the vacuous space, and Barba retreated into it again to press a kiss to the soft expanse of belly before him, a thoughtless gesture on Barba’s part, because it surged like a shot of amphetamines to Carisi’s cock. Ultimately he drew back, away, first onto his knees and then upright in one smooth gesture. 

Barba wasn’t _nearly_ as old and out of shape as he claimed to be. There was strength enough in his legs to rival that of the run of his mouth. 

“This might as well happen,” he said, and then called out to the visitor now _entering his home,_ “Mami? One minute--” 

“It’s your _mom?_ ” Carisi hissed, and at the unperturbed look on his partner’s face, demanded further, “What, like it’s kismet that it should be your _mom?_ ”

“You want to keep sassing me or put on your pants?” Barba asked, and only then did Carisi noticed Barba had already zipped his own and buttoned his shirt, and Carisi’s were _gone_ and gaping open, respectively. He scrambled to collect his pants while clutching his shirt closed.

Carisi glared as Barba snapped his suspenders back into place. The warmth had left his cheeks, drained down his chest and been buttoned over anyway. He looked pristine, like he could take a meeting with the D.A. and a slew of judges and none would be any the wiser. Carisi, meanwhile, only avoided total nudity on a technicality. 

“Stall--her--please--!” 

Barba couldn’t very well do _that,_ but to his credit, he closed the door partway behind him, offering Carisi more cover than he’d have gotten, otherwise. Carisi rushed to smooth his hair and don his clothes, then straighten and re-straighten them until he could pass for presentable.

It was all for naught, as Barba’s mussed hair and kissed-pink lips gave them both away to the woman who knew him best. She met him in the living room, her eyebrow raised speculatively. 

Lucia Barba was dressed for the weather in great swaths of fabrics, and the wrap of her scarf and swing of her overcoat were as theatrical as her interruption. The cream of the former made her skin glow. Carisi only saw a sliver of her through the doorway, but was certain there wasn't a woman alive in New York who could look so warm despite the cold. It was a skill. At the very least, it wasn't something that might have been inherited. Barba, who went red-and-runny nosed at the first frost, had fortitude enough in his mind to stand the winter--and seek it out again during the summer months, to boot--but it overtook him physically. 

“Oh,” Lucia said, and though Carisi couldn’t see the look on her face in person, she lent all her smart intuition to her voice when she said, “Sorry to interrupt.”

Her voice was coiled and coy, a state of being that Barba adopted with striking familiarity. 

“You could have called,” was Barba’s lame retort.

“I did. You could have answered.” Then, to Carisi, who was now in effect _hiding in Barba’s bedroom,_ Lucia called out, “Hello, dear.”

Carisi ducked out of the room, smiled, and tried to play himself off as a hapless visitor. He’d done well, he thought, to temper his inclination to overcompensate on being caught unawares. His shirt wasn’t buttoned to the throat, and he hadn’t donned his suit vest for additional coverage. 

“Hi--Lucia.”

(Though not a matter of the pronunciation, Carisi stumbled over Barba’s mother’s name at every turn. It came out haltingly, like there was something else he’d prefer to call her.)

“Don’t,” Barba said-- _to his mother_ \--though the intention was to coolly excuse Carisi’s efforts, or whatever he chose to make of them. Barba again addressed only his mother, then, as if she had to answer for the impropriety, here, and not Barba or Carisi. 

And wasn’t that a hell of a thing, Carisi thought with a wry little smile. He couldn’t imagine firing a warning shot like that even in the vicinity of his own mother. She’d never forgive him for it, whereas Lucia was already rolling her eyes and accepting the ultimatum. 

Carisi was off-limits.

“What’s up?” Barba asked, and had the gall to sound exasperated.

“No, I’ve interrupted. I’ll go.”

“Mami, the moment’s gone.”

“Aw, that’s news to me,” Carisi tried, though his joking efforts were met with a gaze like polished stone--from Barba--and one from Lucia that might as well have been gas-powered by helium, for how delirious she looked to have witnessed it. The expression on her face was the metaphorical twin to Barba’s when last they went to a bar, their quiet conversation fast overtaken by a neighboring table’s shouts at a baseball game airing on television. Barba’s face had coupled itself with one single thought, mistakenly shared aloud at a lull in the game: _What a cadre of fucking winners._

Carisi had laughed at the time, halfway drunk and only somewhat mortified. 

He wasn’t laughing now, hearing the sentiment like a ghostly echo curling around the shell of his ear. 

Carisi glanced down at the floor. He saw that Barba was in socked feet, and somehow that cheered him. There was something far more damning about pink-and-grey striped socks than the customary evidence Carisi wore in his wrinkled shirt and mussed hair. Carisi’s own socks were black, business-ready, nondescript to the point of invisibility, and formal by comparison.

All the same, he was thankful for the twinkling interruption of yet another mobile phone, swift and final as a guillotine's blade cutting through the silence. 

“That’s my phone!” Carisi exclaimed, and tried not to sound overly relieved. He ducked back into the bedroom to search the floor for it. 

Shaking his head, Barba crossed the living room and placed himself neatly in his kitchen. There was no greater necessity, now, than a drink. 

Lucia, having very much the same idea, followed him. 

“You’d think I’d walked in on you both,” she said.

“Believe me, cutting it close isn’t the winning argument you think it is.”

Barba raised his glass to meet hers-- _salud_ \--and they drank. 

It was months ago that Barba first let it slip that Carisi’s family didn’t have any apparent, _resounding_ interest in meeting him. This much, he’d gathered after months of radio silence on the matter, even from Carisi. It was perhaps a minute into that revelation that Lucia took up the task of ideal in-law, to which Barba denounced quickly: _Mami, no, you are not that._ She shouldered the imaginary title like a cause, and let her will be known through carefully crafted texts and oh-so-casual dinner invitations. She was pointedly inclusive of Carisi, albeit seldom by name.

_You both. You two. The two of you._

Barba was initially wary of her turn, but quickly, _immensely_ thankful for it. Her high-road approach was very much a gift he could present to Carisi: a level of acceptance and approval of which he did not personally steer the interest. His mother never could be cowed to his ideals, so when she came around to them on her own--or, indeed, out of calculated spite--it was cause for some celebration. 

To her credit, Lucia recalled that she quite liked this young man, who’d chatted with her after the guilty verdict came in for the officers menacing her son’s life. He was polite and attentive, and above all, _kind._ And he’d somehow left that impression over the course of a few short hours.

At least, that was the impression she left with her son. Privately, when the idea first settled into her--and, indeed, when she simply found herself lacking her son’s presence in her life as a conversationalist, as a confidant, and as a _friend--_ she made up her mind to shelve the matter. It was well out of her grasp, anyway. 

Her eventual estimation was this: _“He’s not like you at all.”_

She really did mean it well. 

And Barba, with decades of experience translating her moods, understood her. 

He’d smirked around forkful of the most exquisite chocolate cake. They rarely had time for a full meal between the two of them, so desserts and coffee at the most _au courant_ of cafés made for a pleasant compromise. 

He’d reasoned, _“If I dated someone like me, I’d give it a week before I was charged with homicide.”_

_“He’s soft,”_ she’d told him, frowning only a little because she’d never known her son to want something--someone--that didn’t reek of impossibility. _“Sweet. And **Catholic.** ”_

_“ **You’re** Catholic.”_

_“Not the oppressive kind.”_

_“Is there any other?”_

She’d furrowed her brow, then, and set her gaze on her son like a wooden skid, then piled it high with scrutiny. _“Are you saying you’re not?”_

His erroneous contribution already made, Barba had sipped his coffee rather than answer for his religious lapse. He held his tongue, too old and wise, now, to crack the line that there was no undoing years of Catholic schooling, _unfortunately._

_“Let’s go back to sweet,”_ Barba had said. It was, he believed, his strongest, most winning argument. _“He is that.”_

Barba and Lucia could very well have had that conversation again--verbatim--for the looks they were passing one another as Carisi held a short conversation in the other room. Whether he was genuinely speaking to anyone or simply giving himself an out, the gesture was a quiet one, the effort soft--even sweet. 

Barba eyed his mother speculatively. She’d kept her outerwear on, as if it wasn’t entirely her intention to stay for a time. She sipped her scotch lightly, her lipstick never so pressed as to stain the glass. Barba appreciated her grace, and saw it very much as a guide for his own, but thought--somewhat bitterly--that it was studied, practiced behavior. They both had worked to overcompensate for what they’d lacked--never initiative, but _opportunity,_ and all the trappings that befell it.

So much of what they were, now, was driven to a sharp point. 

She caught him staring. She always did.

Lucia patted his cheek and told him mildly that she never got more compliments than when she wore her cream scarf, a luxurious gift from her son.

_Whatever it is you think we’ve done,_ she seemed to say, _Understand this: it worked._

Carisi finished the call and exited the bedroom. He’d buttoned his shirt completely and secured his tie back into place. Most noticeably, his belt--complete with its holstered gun and badge--was returned to his narrow middle. He lead with an open hand and closed in on Barba.

“Hey,” he said, looking apologetic. The hand that found his wrist and squeezed was doubly so. “That was Rollins. We caught a case in Chelsea. I’ll see you later, okay?” Carisi leaned forwards to collect his discarded suit jacket from where--during their earlier drive towards the bedroom--it had landed over a kitchen bar stool. Drawing back, Carisi pressed a chaste kiss to Barba’s cheek. “Friday for sure.”

Barba blinked, unfazed. “What’s Friday?”

“The longest I can go without seeing you,” Carisi said, his voice thrown to its hallowed altar boy roots, though he took a kind of sinister joy in getting one last adoring dig in on Barba. He was so pleased with that one, too, because it was a line Barba couldn’t throw back in his face in front of his mother, lest he explain the whole joke to her. It would come off as either idiotic or darling, and Barba would stand for neither. 

“Uh-huh,” Barba grit out. He knew he’d been bested, though somehow he managed a smile.

“Sorry to run out on you both. Lucia, he’s all yours.”

Lucia told him to stay safe, then let her expression find her son. 

_Soft,_ it said again. _Sweet._

He knew that much, but functionally--he missed it entirely. It blitzed across his cheek, maybe glanced his sharp brow. But Barba’s attention was turned, _served_ wholeheartedly to Carisi. 

“See you,” Barba said. Not one of his better goodbyes, but his mother’s presence was enough to constitute extenuating circumstances, and Barba knew he would be forgiven this slight. 

Carisi let himself out, eyes on his phone as he re-read the address, flat cap and coat fisted in hand, neither yet worn. It was often his way--running into things open, eager, and unprepared. However poorly thought-through, Barba knew he did it with the best of intentions. Carisi meant to get to a place first and to do the most good. 

Timing mattered more, even, than desired outcomes. Carisi was adamant, though oftentimes the reasoning escaped him. In the moment, an assuring presence in a time of complete desolation and confusion seemed a greater thing than even the promise of vindication or justice. Barba, on the other hand, was willing to wait and stall and manage expectations, so long as success was his end.

Carisi disagreed--success and justice were completely different things, void of practical application. Only connections ever truly mattered.

Barba, fed up with broad talk that dismissed his and Carisi’s own contributions through their work, once snarked, _“Are you taking psych classes on the sly? Should I warn the APA?”_ and thereby ended _that_ particular discussion.

Truthfully, Barba knew he was being petty, and taking personally the simple fact that Carisi had experience and insight where Barba did not. He was never put in a position so as to speak with a victim at such a raw, volatile moment. 

And Carisi _ran_ to those moments.

“The look on your face,” Lucia tutted, though the ribbing was more made from fondness than amusement. 

“The look on yours,” Barba countered, finally drawing himself out of his thoughts and snapping to attention. His mother truly did have a soft spot for Carisi, specifically where his work was concerned. In something of an ironic turn, Lucia _had_ always adored the men in her son’s life--with the general exception of those he was dating. 

Carisi _would_ be that outlier. 

Barba spotted something protruding from the purse his mother had sat on his kitchen counter. Accordion file folders left little to the imagination. The purpose of her visit was neither personal nor intellectual--she merely required the tools, thinking, and understanding he’d achieved after decades of studying and application. 

Barba plucked the file and opened it without invitation. He rolled his eyes after merely glancing at the form number printed in grey along the top right corner. 

“Your will again? Mami. _Morosa._ ”

Lucia raised a hand to halt her son’s complaining. She then coolly shed her scarf and coat, and settled herself comfortably on the couch. 

“I do this every three years and every three years, you pretend like it’s a surprise.” 

“And every three years, I’m still not this kind of lawyer.” 

“And yet somehow you manage.” She patted the cushion beside her expectantly. “Here, I have some changes.”

Barba did not take a seat, but he began to sift through the document, seeking out the yellow sticky-notes his mother used to annotate the appropriate changes. There were the simple things--a change in address, most notably--but Barba’s eyebrows leapt to his hairline as he found one change in particular: the direction and discretion of any funds in her name upon her death. 

It had long been Lucia’s intention to leave what she had to the school she helped craft into a thing of some reputation and good. Her legacy went well beyond maintained attendance and soaring graduation rates. She opened her pupils’ eyes to the opportunities that existed for them, even when none seemed close. 

And while Barba had sought his future all on his own, she did not hesitate to use him as an example. 

_Harvard,_ she’d boast. _My son attended Harvard Law school on a scholarship. He grew up on Jerome Avenue, same as many of you. It’s entirely possible. There is living proof._

Her school was her life’s work, yet no longer did she desire a donation be made to the establishment’s arts fund. Rather, she meant for her wealth--nothing substantial, though she made a living for herself--to stay in the family. 

“Me?” Barba asked, and if his hands weren’t occupied wholly with the forms, he would have sought out his glass of scotch to smooth the take on that declaration. 

“Not you, specifically.” Lucia did not mince her words. “The… possibility. Of your family.”

“Sonny?” Barba asked, and was ashamed to hear it sound like a wild guess. Even for a boyfriend, a _partner,_ the term didn’t feel applicable. He narrowed his eyes, the notion of exactly what she was after now slowly dawning on him, though he loathed to believe it. 

He deviated instead, saying, “You know I don’t actually pay him to be here. Oft though I’ve heard it.” 

Lucia ignored him.

“You can do anything these days,” she said, leaving the interpretation of her point up to her son. Again Barba rolled his eyes; she’d arrived at his home with _paperwork_ citing her cause. _Subtlety_ wasn’t in her nature. “And a long-term relationship is the first step.”

“First and final,” Barba answered coolly. Finally, he acquiesced to a seat on the couch, as if proximity would better help reason worm its way into her psyche, and find a comfortable niche there. 

“Mami, I’d point out we’ve only been together a year or so, but that’s besides the point. _Children_ are _beyond_ the point. Keep your money, and get your name and contributions memorialized on the building. You’ve earned it.”

Lucia couldn’t very well argue with her son’s last point, but she carried on, undeterred, “Of course, I’d rather put all that I have towards a grandchild’s education.”

Barba huffed a laugh. His mother often did this: she took sides and manned perspectives on imagined cases, even where there wasn’t one to be heard. Barba had grown up learning to spot and denounce them before she gained much ground. A cool and dismissive, _You want to go to law school, Mami? It’s never too late._ usually did the trick. 

In recent years, Barba found he had to be a little more direct.

“Lower your expectations to _maybe_ a dog, and you’re more than welcome to put it through Obedience School.” 

Lucia scoffed and said, “And, what, you’ll name it after me?”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

She swatted her son on the arm, and though reason dictated that she should accept his first offer and readdress it in time, Lucia was never one to concede so easily.

“You seem so sure,” she said, mouth pinched and poised to raise further questioning. There was a definite curl to her lip when Barba realized she’d gotten something from him without his intending it. 

She asked, “You’ve discussed it, then?”

“No,” Barba said, the word pushing out ahead of uneasy laughter. “But there’s no need.” 

“Hmm,” Lucia said, seemingly unaware that the entire conversation was little more than a garish wasteland. The ground she tred on was little more than flattened, piled dust; if she planted seeds, none could take root. They’d sooner be carried off in an idle wind. 

If Barba turned his head too quickly, they’d surely sail clear out of his ear.

“What, _hmm?_ You can’t play the odds on this one. I’ve got anatomy on my side.”

Lucia waved a hand. She didn’t need to be told twice.

“Let’s talk about something a little lighter,” Barba suggested, then picked up his mother’s paperwork again and in it, found a winner. “Oh, _mortality.”_

Lucia clicked her tongue against the backs of her front teeth, an answer in and of itself. She had not yet had her fill of the idea, and would press until satisfied. 

“It could be good for you,” she said, a mere thought. Barba knew there was interest there--idle curiosity, certainly--but still, he doubted outright approval. Lucia only seemed to deal in a finite amount of the stuff, and Barba still felt the sting of youth when he considered how much of it was spread at his feet compared to those he’d come up with. 

Barba supposed he was only being sensitive, but even at seven, he’d felt tremendous shame and embarrassment after being told to follow another boy’s example rather than champion his own. His fingernails dug into and picked that chip into his shoulder, joining it with an already vast collection: his name, his language, his upbringing, his neighborhood. He chalked it up to his not being seen or heard for what he thought or _thought he knew._ And that didn’t seem like reason enough to silence himself and follow at a respectable distance behind his friend. 

So Barba spoke out louder, spit his opinions faster. He sharpened his vocabulary and stuffed it fat with ideas.

Since he was seven years old, Barba never again went looking for examples. 

He wondered if his mother latched onto these gutting pieces of commentary subconsciously, or if her seeking out only the sorts of things Barba could never stand to do--settle down, play nice, become a pillar of his community, and render himself into an unmitigated success--was a referendum on the choices he _did_ make. 

Into her son’s lengthy silence, Lucia repeated: “It could be very good for you.”

“Because _that’s_ what children are. A lark.”

It came out snappish, but Barba left it that way. With her innate and steely composure, Lucia circled the comment before neatly picking it up, smoothing it out, and tearing it apart. 

“Dearest son, my sole progeny, are you trying to convey an _opinion_ on _my_ choice on the matter? You could look in a mirror and have my answer.”

“I’m hardly a winning argument,” Barba said, then reaffirmed shortly: “The answer is no.” 

He straightened her papers out over his knee, then slid them back into the accordion folder from which they arrived. They were the folder’s only occupant; Lucia was far too careful--too superstitious?--a woman to casually compound death with work. Her son didn't inherit _that_ from her, to be sure. 

“So, while I appreciate the thought--” He didn’t, really. “--you should leave this how it is. Don’t waste time and money on the processing fees.” And despite his connections, those were never cheap. “ _There’s_ a lark for you.” 

Lucia narrowed her gaze but blew a breath and threw up her hands. Surrender, at last.

“I appreciate your candor, I suppose.”

“If I could swaddle it and present it to you a amidst a swell of gender-neutral balloons, I would.”

Barba stood, rolled back his shoulders and shelved his hands on his hips. They were easy, comfortable gestures made in the comfort of his home, yet hanging from them was a sense of purposelessness as Barba looked around his apartment, suddenly unhappy. 

He tucked that feeling away behind an affable smile. 

“Have you eaten?”

“Are you offering to cook?”

“There’s leftovers,” Barba stipulated, and then, in case the issue wasn’t yet clear: “ _He_ cooks.”

When Lucia raised a sculpted brow in an effort to look sceptical, Barba rushed to meet her there, then went on ahead, leaving any discussion of his and Carisi’s home-life behind. There were facts--they had dinner together several nights a week--and then there were details--Carisi often cooked. The _details,_ Barba knew, would ravage his case for simplicity. He couldn’t let his mother acquire an arsenal.

Quickly, he offered, “Or we could go out. Or order in.”

Lucia stood, smoothed her hands down her skirt, and joined with her outfit a smirk. 

“Oh, no,” she said in what Barba would classify as practically a _coo_ of excitement. “Let’s see what your young man can do.”

Barba had no concerns that Carisi’s cooking might not rise to the challenge, but his evening was nonetheless tempered by its inherent loss. His mother was hardly tricky company; she wanted only for biting wit and deep talk, and Barba could deliver that much in his sleep. 

And yet, he’d ran his mouth in court all day, in arraignment hearings, and at colleagues and apparent passersby. Surrounded now by the comforts of him, he’d hoped instead for an opportunity for quiet, and for his mouth to maybe only be watched surreptitiously by someone who enjoyed him well enough in silence. 

The thought alone surprised him, because when--if _ever_ \--had Barba wanted to be seen at anything but his best? At his sharpest conversation, attire, and wit? When had he gamely opted to expose himself as tired and meek?

When had the very idea of showing himself in less forgiving positions ever not strike like ice down his spine, and sink as foul food in his gut, surer signs than any that he was scaling a short edge atop a high cliff? 

_Idiot,_ he said to himself. _Have you never been in love before?_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is something I should have said in my first chapter notes, but I was too in need of a rant. _Anyway:_ Thank you guys for reading. It's beyond my ability to say how giddy your excitement for and enjoyment of this series makes me feel. To those I've been able to chat with on tumblr and elsewhere, I thank you. You guys are half the fun.   
>  (The other half is being on break at work and typing up this shit on my phone really, really intently.)

Friday brought a snowstorm and a home-cooked meal, neither a first by any measure, but nonetheless something tumultuous and great for occurring in tandem. 

Outside, churning winds kept the snow moving, practically skimming over sidewalks and street signs until it was ultimately carried well off the island. It felt very all-for-naught when Barba entered his apartment, still wearing the cold on his face, and snow in his hair. Yet there was no new accumulation, and little else to suggest he’d hustled through icy winds, cursing the construction that had narrowed his street with snow-capped orange cones and icy scaffolding. 

That there was nothing on his shoes to speak for what he ardently believed was a _trek_ was some cruel irony. Barba did not want to ruin the line leather, but evidence would strengthen his case when Carisi accused him of whining.

But neither came to pass, as another unanticipated turn was that Carisi cooked in silence. He uttered nary a word beyond a distracted, _Hey, welcome home,_ while methodically eyeing the baking chicken and stirring the fragrant saffron risotto. 

Barba only noticed the lack of warm, never-ending chatter after he’d gotten through an entire chapter in a Karl Marx biography without interruption. He closed the book on his lap, listened with his head cocked slightly, as though there was breadth of space enough in his apartment that he could miss a thing like that.

“Sonny?”

“Yeah,” Carisi replied, and Barba, sensing no question lingered there, said nothing in return. 

He merely withdrew his attention from his book and watched from time to time--studied, really--the set weight on Carisi’s brow, sometimes lifting as if to take one brief breath to mandate his survival, before returning to a suffocating draw once more. It was torturous, and doubly so to watch.

But Barba decided it was a better thing than to inquire, at least just yet. If Carisi was doing a poor job of keeping those mounting thoughts off his face, there was no keeping them out of his mouth for too long.

While Carisi balked at the suggestion that cooking was labor-- _It’s **fun.** Think back a couple decades--do you remember fun, Raf?_ \--Barba did what he could to pull his weight. 

He set the table. 

It was hardly a laborious task, but he was careful-- _fussy_ \--in his placements, and mindful of what he had to work with. The tabletop was glossy, a narrow spread of gleaming cherry wood. He set it with simple silverware, glasses, and pristine white-and-grey striped cloth napkins. _The spoils of having an in-unit washer and dryer,_ Barba had once said when Carisi questioned if they’d ever once been used. Carisi still doubted it.

(But Barba knew he couldn’t prove anything.)

Carisi fixed their plates while Barba--having migrated back to the living room--considered putting on a record. The collection was wholly familiar to Carisi now, and Barba knew the albums that would stir the man’s soul or give him pause, the songs with which to undo him. Given Carisi’s willful silence, Barba thought better of it, and decided instead to make a point. He'd escalate the effort to an unavoidable degree and surely win the day.

Admittedly, Carisi called his bluff and did him one better: he silently held a moment of grace before the meal, something that Barba noticed but did not speak to. He merely waited, fork raised but stalled awkwardly when he realized the purposeful bowing of Carisi’s head, the soundless movements of his lips. 

Carisi broke form to beam at his creation: saffron risotto and baked lemon chicken. Mounds of both were set on two deceptively simple white plates, themselves lined with a silver stripe along the circumference. Perfectly serviceable, if needlessly beautiful. Of course Barba would be one to purchase his kitchenware in the same mind as he did his socks.

Though, if Carisi had said as much aloud, Barba would have had a fast retort.

_You’re one to talk._

The meal he’d prepared was a thing of unparalleled beauty, and if Barba had words for it, even the most perfect ones, they might still fall short. Words were less terms of endearments than food was an endearment made physical, different from the body, because it was arranged for complete consumption. 

The saffron in particular stained much of the feast a warm, inviting orange-red, a color unknown to them since the City’s collapse into darkest winter. Inherently strange and wonderful to the eyes and nose, Barba was so otherwise preoccupied that his thoughts did not once reach out to question palatability. 

(How _would_ it taste, though, long after the meal was had and only the spice’s resin was traded between tongues?) 

In addition to the creamy risotto and succulent chicken, Carisi produced a bowl of dark, wet spinach sautéd to perfection. A fork was stuck into its depths, and Carisi seemed unhappy about that. 

“You don’t have tongs,” he said, and it may very well have been his first shared sentiment in over an hour.

And this was Barba’s: “What are tongs?”

The line didn’t gain him any traction, only a one-off, mostly unsuccessful attempt at a smile on Carisi’s part. It was the lone hiccup in the prolonged silence they’d set and paced through like a marathon. Only that, and nothing more. 

Perhaps in deference to his and Barba’s respective appetites--though woefully ignorant of Barba’s own waiting curiosity--Carisi did not speak until they’d finished their meal, and Barba poured himself a scotch and handed Carisi a beer.

“So, this case,” Carisi started, without preamble, unless one counted the heady silence as they ate. Barba did--it was a preview of all the things Carisi hoarded in his mind, but questioned facing aloud. 

On Barba’s part, there was some relief that trailed the revelation that Carisi’s unease was work-related, because that much, Barba could fathom. Their work crossed corners and laid heavily over one another, and Barba had spent a lifetime coming to terms with all that he’d seen. People had an endless capacity for violence and depravity, but Barba had words enough from the opposite end of the spectrum. They were not answers--he had none of those, only counterarguments and the law--but they comforted him, and settled his perspective into something manageable, even as ambitious as a man as he was, and as he found himself drawn to. 

They were strong testimonials to combat the dark impulses of revenge and retribution, and all manner of things that lay outside the law. Outside his purview. 

Those macabre truths, Barba could play like a song. Anything more closely rendered towards the heart and he would undoubtedly come up short. 

Barba wondered if, even a year into this relationship, Carisi understood the simple fact that he could air his grievances at home, that the rules of polite society and willful ignorance did not cross his threshold.

Moreover, it wasn’t so catastrophic a failure on Carisi’s part if he needed reinforcements in facing a day’s work. There _should_ be some silver lining to the simple fact that neither man could turn away or close his mind to the things they saw. Why not witness the burden for one another? Surely they would double the load, but taken together, it would hardly seem so great.

“What about it?” Barba prompted gently, still mindful of Carisi’s sudden propensity to sink into silence.

“We caught a break. Our victim went to services at St. Columba, and volunteered there sometimes. Did good work. And this priest--”

“Here it comes,” Barba murmured, expecting the worst.

“--broke a confidence to give us pertinent information. _Jackass._ ” 

Barba blinked in surprise. Taken from Carisi’s lips, the comment was a touch too raw, and Barba surprised himself by feeling stung. 

He leaned back in his chair, uncertain as to what it was he’d expected when watching Carisi mull over his thoughts and squirm at the mere thought of their undertaking.

More pressingly, Carisi didn’t name call; that was Barba’s department. From Barba, there was a quality of endearment in the ribbing, and beyond that--needless enjoyment in taking returned fire. From Carisi, the slights felt earned.

Carisi sighed and set his hands open, as if he knew any apology he gave would sound empty and useless. 

Then, as if he did not want to consider the ordeal at all, but the memories were too ready in his consciousness and his was a choice of facing or burying them, Carisi admitted, “Rollins saw he was gettin’ kinda green when we told him what we were investigating. She pushed for that. I didn’t.”

Rather than consider the possibility that Carisi was opening a bit of himself up, exposing a tightly-held bias and a willingness to try and understand it, Barba ran his mouth. 

“It’s your genuine belief that he should take whatever is said to him in a confessional to the grave? Really?” 

Barba saw his error immediately, but again--his thoughts were too quick for his sense. 

“You see where this runs afoul of your profession, don’t you?”

He supposed he was lucky, then, that Carisi was perpetually poised to forgive him this.

“I dunno,” Carisi hedged. “I hope my priest never said anything. S’kind of the point.”

Barba raised an eyebrow, tried for guileless innocence, though it really never was his best look. “Anything you need going to the grave?”

“Well, not _now._ ”

Barba understood immediately. 

Answers filled the silence that followed, leaving it bloated and heavy. It pressed against their faces, made the kitchen table legs creak under its weight. It neither sucked the room dry nor turned the air noxious; it only appeared, wholly independent of its surrounding circumstances. Their shared company, _the reason for it,_ all seemed adjacent. Why, then, should Barba be made privy to an intensely private matter Carisi hoped not even his priest had breathed a word into? 

But, perhaps that was the point. 

Barba wanted to make up for his brash line of defense, and be tender instead. He couldn’t very well extend a saffron-flavored kiss across the table, so he found Carisi’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Carisi took the gesture and ran with it, interlocking their fingers and holding on tight. 

Barba gave a weak half-smile at the display. It unnerved him how adept Carisi was at obscuring his past--essentially, by gas-lighting a beautiful future. He did this with the purest intentions, but it was a concerted effort all the same. 

“How’d that conversation go?”

“ _Conversation_ is overstating it,” Carisi joked. He took back his hand. If he was going to share this story for the first time in his life, Carisi needed both to keep steady as surely as he needed his wits to ground him.

He fidgeted at first. One hand found his elbow, scratched at the cold-crackled skin there. Then he went still as stone.

“Um. I was fifteen. I told him there were things about me… he asked, that I’d done? I said no, things I was. _Am._ ” The correction was swift, and joining it was a shameful spread of pink across his cheeks, staining him as perpetually embarrassed for a mistake he thought he made all too often. 

It seemed a hell of a thing to let slip his mind, but given such an ardent denial of the self, Barba was surprised he didn’t fall prey to it _more._

His brow returning to the furrowed state he’d held while cooking, Carisi continued, “And he knew. I knew that he knew and I nearly bolted outta that confessional and ran straight into traffic. I couldn’t stand the thought that someone might know. _Especially_ a priest.”

Carisi smiled, then, as relief found him well. He was as far away from that time in his life as possible, and drifted further still with each passing moment. He had a partner, now. And beyond kind and brilliant, the mere fact that the person he’d found to love was a man was something he’d only scarcely imagined. It had been a secret fantasy that found him like a knife to his gut, twisting into his side and sliding out hot, wet, and with every intention of allowing him to bleed out in his childhood bedroom, a massacre among scattered Hot Wheels cars and paper planes.

That’s what these desires were, after all. A death sentence in the most literal sense.

To have one, then--let alone one who claimed Carisi was those things in turn--was sometimes still too much to bear. Carisi saw the warmth in Barba’s face, the concern he had for Carisi’s tale to end better than it began. That was his singular hope for all things. 

And Carisi was glad to be able to deliver on that.

“He said, maybe you’re mistaken.”

“What.” 

The softness in Barba’s expression was stripped away, and left no lingering trace. Like any green clinging to the cityscape throughout the autumn, it was gone after that first bitter frost. It might as well have never been there, for as thoroughly as it removed itself. 

The sentiment echoed back and forth in his mind. He imagined Carisi as young and terrified, in perpetual awe of some old man backed against his aged institution, and fed those words between their mouths, and listened, waited, vied for reason to make itself known.

He saw nothing worthy of the hopeful smile Carisi had used to pass these sentiments along.

For as much as Barba loathed politics, he understood them. Politics was promises, and denials that those promises were ever made. The Catholic church was of course as political a figure as Barba could name. 

And _that_ was as passionate a denial as anything Barba had ever heard, and he’d heard a few. They came more ardent, most _painfully,_ from the guilty. 

_Compassion, pity, understanding? Those core concepts of our very faith? **From me?** No, never. You’ll sooner find a dead hooker in my skimmed-collection-plate-funded-camaro than any of that._

Barba had been expecting--hoping--for a kindly priest, that one person a confused young man was lucky enough to meet at the precise moment he needed them most. Someone to tell Carisi he was as God made him, and good, and worthy, and all that bullshit Barba had long since discarded in his own right. It seemed to be what Carisi most wanted, and Barba was fast to believe he’d gotten it in some small measure. That was how the story went, when the addled youngster in question eventually grew into a proud, gentle man. 

If Carisi had been denied empathy, Barba thought, there was surely no way for him to espouse it now, and so well, and for all.

_That_ was the story to earn its accompanying smile, however weak and drawn. Nothing in what Carisi told him, in Barba’s view, deserved as much. 

Carisi was taken aback by Barba’s sharp turn. 

“He said--”

“I heard what you said he said. I just can’t fucking believe it.” 

Barba spoke with naked contempt, and pushed away from the table, as if there was moral high ground to be claimed in not sitting idly by being fed this kind of drek. He raced to it, and in doing so left Carisi stalled in the lowlands.

A hand found the bridge of his nose and held it together, as if Barba thought his head would literally crack open under the weight of this revelation. 

He tried to parse through the facts Carisi had presented. None could mesh with the soft tones he’d tucked them into, the quiet affirmation of a deed done right by him. 

Barba collected himself, his thoughts, and asked directly: “When you said a priest saved your life, you meant he infused you with enough self-doubt that you could run on fumes for another fifteen years until you wised up?”

His arguments were--as always--difficult for Carisi to reason around. Barba did not obfuscate his point; nuance was for stories, not juries. And now more than ever as he progressed with his career and raised his reputation to new heights, Barba did not entertain fools or foolish questions. His words were steel-backed and cast iron. _Impenetrable._

Carisi succumbed to the logic of this one, but stipulated quietly, “That was what I needed, though.”

“No, it wasn’t!” Barba said, disgust twisting into his words like a scandent vine. “Your twenties, Sonny! Even just an afternoon at fifteen! What you _needed_ was some _assurances,_ not a _word problem._ ”

This was an injustice, and a pervasive one if-- _to this day_ \--Carisi excused its purpose. Whether he understood it or not, the words were meant to diminish him, not save him. 

“You didn’t have to doubt yourself,” Barba insisted, while thinking bitterly, _Again with this romantic privilege of the damned._

That Carisi should accept so little struck too close to home for Barba, who had gotten by on that sentiment when he first initiated their sexual relationship, but spoke nothing of emotional or romantic attachments. And if Carisi made those feeble noises, Barba had refused to hear them. 

Selfishly, Barba did not want to put himself back in that long line of abusers, starting with a priest. It was poor company to keep. 

“Why should you suffer and he gloat?” Barba asked, and in it was a hapless question he’d often demanded of himself. Maybe Carisi would have his answer. 

“Raf, look, it was enough. It was more than enough.”

_You’re letting us all off too easily,_ Barba thought. He looked devastated by Carisi’s hardline of excuses. Privately, this was largely for himself. Without Carisi’s mandate on how others might have failed him, Barba would not be handed any neat truths; he’d have to wade through his own mud to get them. 

“No. No, no, no.” Barba said, and felt compelled to stand, to make his arguments from a place of whatever gained authority he could muster. He worried he was creeping towards petulance, when he knew this was a greater injustice, entirely deserving of its due outrage. 

“That’s horrendous. Would you do that to someone? Would you take all their fears, pile them like kindling, and add fuel to the fire? Would you encourage the kind of self-loathing you felt at fifteen in someone who asked the same of you?”

Quietly, Carisi relented. “No, of course not.”

“Then why is that good enough for you?”

“Because I wasn’t kidding about running into traffic,” Carisi said. 

He looked so small sat at Barba’s kitchen table, and not only for the distant echo of his words. His eyes did not find Barba, but narrowed in on his plate and over the streaks of orange-colored risotto, just individual grains, but to Carisi they might as well have been mountains, for the cover they afforded him. Same as his beer, into which he dug his thumbnail along the plastic label. It was a sturdy little battlement. 

“Trust me, it was enough.”

With his shoulders pitched forward, his gaze thrown to the floor, Carisi looked as though he’d been dropped from a great height, and nothing had been set to break his fall. There was shame in his features, creeping out of tear ducts and the corners of his mouth to tighten and draw all with roving discomfort. He looked--Barba guessed--very much in the vein of what he must have felt so vividly in his youth as to finally air his grievance, and be so wracked with terror for doing so.

_Goddamnit._

_Goddamnit, Goddamnit, **Goddamnit.**_

It was Barba, now, who was desperate to hide, who was ashamed. He ran a hand over his mouth, and found the line there troubled and wronged, the lip tightly pressed to refrain from uttering even a syllable towards another destructive word. His own breath was no longer sweet from the saffron, but dry as winter air. 

He felt a sudden pain in his left side, just between his sixth and seventh ribs. It was sharp and distinct, and he knew it only as mourning. There were ideas he had about Carisi, about his brightness and unparalleled spirit. He didn’t want to see them taken from the man, or given up. The latter excused Barba of any fault, so he stuck with the former. Whatever wholesome notions about himself Carisi still entertained were gone, now. Barba had taunted them free from guard, and when they stood naked, he’d slaughtered them. 

Barba heard the bitter convictions of his thoughts spelled aloud again, this time as a sharp intake of breath. He wondered briefly if this pain was too old to relieve Carisi of its ills, and if he shouldn’t just apologize and let the matter rest, but thought--even so. 

He should hear it. 

He should hear and understand it and do for Carisi what Carisi had automatically done for him in his time of great need: listen, and be present, and witness. Barba’s hurts were newer, his pain more panicked than slow and onset. (That was more to the tune of his anger, admittedly.) Carisi’s, he knew now, was stored in an old wound, buried deep under the skin and encased around muscle, bone, and scar tissue.

But those could still ache from time to time.

“Come here.”

Barba did not often offer hugs, so he termed what happened next as an _embrace._ He was more likely to entertain with a huff and a sigh those imparted on him by Carisi. Fittingly, his body seemed uncertain in how to mime one. His shoulders sort of sagged and he splayed his hands open. He felt useless for it, but a smile tugged at Carisi’s mouth, and Barba was well met for his efforts.

Barba held Carisi snug around the middle, kissed him--cheek and ear and palm, too, when it was raised to cup Barba’s cheek in turn.

“I can’t believe you let me hand you a beer,” Barba muttered. “That was obviously a two-scotch revelation.”

Carisi laughed against his shoulder, a telltale “ha ha” that belied genuine feeling in the sentiment. He couldn’t yet find humor in Barba’s response, let alone the thing that prompted it. What he accessed instead was Barba’s regret, and in feeling it found his own. He settled his long arms around Barba’s broad shoulders--and, really, wasn’t that a perfect fit?--and shared a reassuring squeeze.

“You never felt like that?” Carisi asked, and wondered if he should be embarrassed for assuming otherwise. He didn’t feel that; only confused. He knew Barba was as iron-willed as they came, but how could anyone’s own gumption supersede the church’s order? 

It was part of what he’d always been told: _those_ kinds of people were sick, diseased, miserable. No wonder so many of them took their own lives, or set about to give someone else the opportunity. Even if he'd put those notions aside for the sake of his own soul, Carisi caught himself thinking, _well, surely there's something to it?_

“No. I only ever wished my enemies dead,” Barba said, the solution as entirely simple now as it had first found him in his youth. “Please try it. It’s deeply satisfying.” 

“I don’t need to do either anymore,” Carisi said, and slumped heavily against Barba’s hold, as though it was a pleasant place to fall.

Barba made himself a hardy point of contact, supposing he should be good for something, if not particularly welcome Judeo-Christian insights. He felt as though he'd robbed Carisi of a simple pleasure: an open audience. Barba had always enjoyed his, even when it did not arrive naturally, and he'd had to speak louder and in words more profound to bend an ear. Barba drew lines across their respective experiences, and believed that whether in ways obvious or hidden, they'd both felt that overlarge hand press heavily over their mouths. They'd both felt stifled. 

Barba knew that hand--he took it in his own and shook it regularly while navigating through his life and career--but _Carisi._ Carisi may well have snapped his own limbs in an attempt to twist around himself and exact the perfect chokehold. 

Barba brought a hand to rest on the back of Carisi's neck, as if to see for himself that there were no scratch marks, no bruising. No evidence of the verbal lashes he'd snapped.

They held each other, the effort simple, the desire clear. Only the purpose eluded them. 

“You can’t give me that kind of ammunition,” Barba said, and though still stinging with guilt, he tried to sound cavalier. “I’m a bitter old man. I’ll do my worst with it.” 

To his dismay, he'd miscalculated, and the sentiment bore an air of accusation, the subtle stink of early rot. 

“Sorry, that sounded--”

“I know you just want to protect me,” Carisi murmured, and though there was warmth there in his speech and from his lips and in his heart, Barba heard those works like the clink of ice against glass. They were necessary and short, just noise in service to something greater than itself. 

They were the words one said when love was at the table and had to be fed, so the bearers scraped from their own plates and made it a meal. 

In that same perfunctory tone, Carisi continued, “It’s cool. I feel the same way.” Then, thawing, “I’m kind of on the nose about it.”

“From each according to his ability,” Barba muttered, and undoubtedly felt silly for allowing their embrace to linger. But Carisi's was a shape he'd missed for two days, and even with recent proximity, his silence was material enough so to erect a wall between them, and Barba wouldn’t rescind the effort it took to tear it down.

“Still,” Barba said. “Don’t let me talk to you like that.” 

“Hey, you got there.” 

“Hm. Is that the position you’ll take the next time I think your inaction for a thing fifteen years past deserves my shouting about it?”

Barba drew away--finally--but felt displaced by the distance. His body overcompensated and he squinted, as if there were miles put between them. Casting his pride aside, he remedied the error, and fell back close. Carisi was quick to receive him. 

It felt like natural law: Barba would sink and Carisi would rise to take and consume him.

When he inched back again, it was with purpose. Barba held Carisi’s face in his hands, remembering what it was like to want to do only this. To risk only an awkward turn, and not levy some inter-office infraction. 

Years.

He took liberties, now, and let kindness guide his hands. He took Carisi to the bedroom, and set about the work of undressing him. He left the rest behind: his beautiful plates, their lovely meal, the remnants of their argument tabled along with them. 

Barba levied some of Carisi’s tactics back at him--namely, silence while performing his artful task. He took quiet care with every button, and even extended a careful hand to the knotted tie Carisi had stuck halfway inside his shirtfront while cooking. The material, Barba guessed for its unnatural sheen and smoothness, was highly flammable. 

All that parted his lips was the occasional huff of breath, or idle hum. 

Soon, they laid together, whole and plain for themselves and for the other. Rather than a moment for sex--or the possibility thereof--they found themselves pleased and saturated with heat. In it, unspooled like thread, was a kind of necessity born and bred in the heart. As Barba did not reach a hand and raise the proverbial flag, nor did Carisi sully the moment with his fumbled attempts at dirty talk, which had all the finesse of a thirteen-year-old playing _Halo._

_I’m going to lay waste to… your asshole._

Barba’s bed was warm in much the way as Carisi’s meal had been: a thing made and unmade in either the presence of or in participation with the other. 

“Anything else you want to spring on me?” Barba asked, and preemptively rolled his eyes. Carisi didn’t take the bait, anyway. He smoothed his hands along the slope of Barba’s back, the jut of his ass. He fondled nothing, but instead held fast to this body as though it was his own. 

Barba shivered. Thoughtless possession was well beyond him, a thing so imprecise that he had to grapple with it even as it carried on, easily, by Carisi’s own hand.

Barba had had to fight and navigate and compromise for so much of what he cherished. Everything he put his name to, he’d first gripped by the fingernail, then worked and fought until it was wrestled underneath him. Lovers, he thought, went much the same way. He started small, and sank his hooks in. 

And beyond that, he was _impatient._ That alone led fast to manhandling. 

Here, he was taken. _Easily won,_ of all things. He did not doubt Carisi would give himself in much the same way, if indeed Barba dared to claim him. 

He flexed his fingers, but only that. 

“I do want to know,” Barba said, still feeling like a heel. “Everything. I want you to be able to tell me-- _everything._ ”

“I want to,” Carisi said, but stopped short. He had breath enough in him for more, and Barba had taken care not to steal it away. But Carisi squandered the moment, and shook his head afterward. 

_Pay no mind,_ he smiled.

“It’ll help curb my tendency to be an insensitive asshole,” Barba said, a last-ditch effort to encourage conversation. 

Carisi leaned his thin frame over Barba to press a kiss into the hollow of the man's chest. There was a place, just above his belly, where his stone-set rib cage broke open and allowed for a little divot of flesh to form, a valley between cresting mountains. 

“What, forging human connections?” Carisi asked, grinning up from his covert position. “You _just_ figured that out?”

“Like, two weeks ago,” Barba said, and playfully flicked Carisi’s ear. “Give me a little credit.” 

“I give you all the credit,” Carisi insisted, but sank back away all the same. He rested on his back for a moment, his posture a mirror of Barba’s. He stared up at the ceiling, frowning, as though he saw more there than there was to see.

“Thank you,” he said at last. Awe had tamed his voice, reined everything in back inside himself. “For wanting to stick up for me, even retroactively.” 

Barba was not so impressed with himself.

“Literally the least I can do.”

“It means a lot.” 

Carisi’s gaze fell away from the ceiling, but rather than set upon Barba again--and, therein, all there was to see fit snug into a t-shirt and boxer briefs--it went westward and found the bedroom window. Carisi stared into a wedge of complete darkness and realized it had stopped snowing.

Carisi felt Barba shift, and knew he was being stared at. After everything, it still made him squirm. Barba’s eyes were naturally studious. Great and wide and ever-open, they seemed to take in more from the world. Carisi pulled reams of wastebasket science to make his case that a greener eye _would_ see more, and Barba’s were that imperceptible shade on the outskirts of the brightest whites, and buried in the darkest shadows.

Barba registered everything, and while Carisi found that admirable and fortunate--given his line of work--he was nonetheless unnerved at being the subject of such inherent scrutiny. 

It was difficult work, the act of being seen. Carisi knew that now. 

“Your mom likes me, right?”

The question burst forth as though Carisi had been holding it back. 

Surprise tugged at Barba’s mouth, but he kept it out of his words. “M-hm. I thought it would be difficult to gage that from her, but she seems to. Very much. Why?”

Carisi made a face. Barba could feel it dragging against the side of his head like a child-drawn hubcap across an empty lot, a makeshift home plate.

“What, why? I care if your mom likes me, that’s why.”

“It has literally no bearing on us,” Barba said, as if that should be equally as obvious. Carisi heaved an audible sigh.

“I don’t need her approval,” Barba continued, slow but sure, and his emotions were really the only thing about him that carried on in such a way. Everything from his speech to his thought processes, his dress and his wit, was lightening fast and sharp from start to finish. He was white teeth breaking through flesh--a little too much for his own good, sometimes. A little dangerous as a result. He’d cut himself many times. 

He relented, slightly, towards what it was Carisi wanted to hear: “It’s nice to have, I suppose. Yes.”

“Are you serious?”

Barba gave up, came clean. “Maybe it’s just my experience, but--consider who she was with at my age.”

“Huh.”

“Right.” Barba’s first instinct was to turn away, to bury this conversation in his pillow and obliterate it, later, by acts of lovemaking. He wanted to close his eyes hard, too hard, until his vision blurred and he felt dizzy and would have a genuine excuse to want to make himself feel better. He took a breath instead. 

He tried to be patient.

“I’m only saying, I can’t begrudge her for begrudging me, if she did. Which she doesn’t, so I’m coming out way ahead.” He softened, then, upon realizing that his reasoning was steeped in old conflicts, the likes of which Carisi never had a hand in. 

Barba pressed his nose against Carisi’s shoulder, and let his words take on a slightly nasal tone.

“Is that okay?”

_The things he did for this man._

“Yeah,” Carisi huffed, bemused. Barba felt him relax. “Yeah, I get it.” 

“Oh!” Barba started to say, the thought only just having occurred to him. “You’ll laugh. Or cry. But, my mother likes you _so much,_ she thinks you’ll give her grandchildren.” 

Barba waited for the sputtered laughter, the inevitable guffaw startled out of the other man as if with genuine force. He wanted that pistol-pop of surprise, the same as had found him. None came. And when Carisi did provide a response, it was impossibly soft, almost absent any weight at all. He spoke, and his words wafted upwards to catch themselves on heavenly peaks. 

“Really?”

It was awe, but easily mistaken for its less illustrious cousin, astonishment. 

“I _know,_ ” Barba said, nothing if not mortified. “My first thought was early onset dementia. I set her straight.”

“Oh.”

Barba’s phone buzzed and, seeing a natural end to their conversation, he leaned over Carisi to fetch it. The blue-white glow cast over his face was strangely calming. Instead of under a blanket of snow and caught with a chill, Carisi felt as if his whole world had found itself in the dark depths of the ocean. The silence there was so profound, so deafening, that Carisi’s innermost thoughts found their way to the surface, and were heard.

“How good are we, do you think?”

Barba frowned, but did not cease typing the response he’d started. “Excuse me?”

His most intimate reflections, and Barba had only thought to make ripples.

“Together,” Carisi clarified. “As a couple.”

Barba continued typing; he could juggle a legal argument in one hand with a question of semantics in the other. “I don’t think you can quantify that. It’s not baseball, you can’t run stats against other couples.”

“This, from a guy who makes judgements for a living.” 

“I make arguments, _thank you,”_ Barba said, and punctuated his response with the completion of his e-mailed reply. He set his phone aside and gave Carisi his full attention. The younger man, Barba decided, would come to regret it. 

People did not _get_ to ask an argument from him and turn away thinking they’d won. It simply did not happen. 

_Except._

This wasn’t an argument for taking sides. Barba thought--he hoped--they’d land at very much the same conclusion. 

_Are we good?_

Barba imagined Carisi was seeking confirmation, and only put the matter to his partner as a question out of a sense of conversational necessity. 

_Are we good?_

_Together?_

“You want a ruling? I think we’re good. Very good.” He threw confidence behind his words--heaps of it. It spilled like a slick varnish, and gave everything a near-gaudy shine, and suddenly his was a mouth fit for a pageant queen, complete with a vaseline-made smile. “Here’s where you might want to chime in, _I think so too!_ ”

Carisi rolled his eyes again. Barba was struck by the thought that his own mannerisms looked good on the other man.

“I mean, we’re _okay.”_

He’d gone back to teasing, so Barba took half a step back and gladly met him there.

“Well gee, coach, what do you think it’ll take?” 

Barba was angling for a scrimmage under the sheets, but the expression on Carisi’s face was still wanting, and some quick math provided Barba an answer. Carisi wanted to know how he and Barba stacked up--simple enough. Where things got complicated--things always did, under the sun, out in open air, stood before prying eyes--was that he wanted confirmation from the outside world for what he felt when he and Barba lived segments of their lives as shared. 

But he didn't want unsolicited opinions; he'd had enough of those. 

Carisi wanted peer-reviewed conclusions. 

“You want _couple friends,_ ” Barba realized, aghast. “I’m--a little appalled, honestly.” Because how very _bridge-and-tunnel_ of him. As New Yorkers, they should be spared those tired clichés. “And, blissfully, without any. All of my friends are either perpetually single or already married.”

“Those are couples,” Carisi said.

_Only in the strictest sense,_ Barba wanted to say. _Because there’s paperwork, and I can’t count the times pairs of these people have come to me individually, secretly curious as to how to undo it all._

“You do _not_ want married friends,” Barba said. It took a moment, but he found himself reminded of Carisi’s ilk. Cops, often young, married younger, with kids and whole lives to distract from the rigors of their day jobs. There were heinous crimes, traumatized victims, and a system that only offered tangential justice--but there were also date nights, and grocery lists, and homework assignments. Barba did not know those lives, had never been close enough to see them play out. He knew there was considerable strain--Benson had some tales to tell--but by in large that world was not his own, and he was--at best--a rubbernecker when things fell apart. 

Beyond living in re-mortgaged homes in as close to a suburb as the City allowed, Barba didn’t know _what_ they did. _How_ they functioned. 

He did not know, too, if Carisi was naturally inclined to want all of that. If the arc of his life bent deliberately towards those grossly overpriced brownstones in good school districts, to friends who only ever arrived in mismatched pairs, to a life of promised order when his work offered so little sense.

Barba decided--quite simply--to ask.

“Do you enjoy yourself when you’re with me?” He tried for plain, reasoned. In truth, he hated being forced to speak to what amounted to romantic intention. There was nothing more telling of his own limitations than the trepidation in his voice, which ran like a main artery under his polished answers. 

This should be easy, Barba thought. With Carisi, it should be the easiest thing he’d ever do.

“Do you enjoy what we do?” he clarified, because the sudden wide-eyed terror on Carisi’s face at being asked something so seemingly huge was pitiable. “Be honest. Maybe there’s something you’d prefer to be doing.”

Barba thought about the nights they spent within the confines of his apartment, extending often only to a radius of a few blocks. They shared meals and conversations, then warmth and a bed. They talked, worked, and read. And when they ventured out for those rare evenings they could plan ahead--the theatre. Barba certainly enjoyed it, but from a younger man’s outlook, _supposed_ he could understand it for monotonous and too self-contained. 

“Something fun?” 

Barba hoped he was on the track of things he could tolerate--more weekend trips, bars--rather than the club scene or sporting events. 

Carisi found his answer at once.

“I wish you’d go to Mass with me sometimes.”

Barba was quick to school his expression of a drawn brow and pursed lips that was, as ever, his first response when the impossible was asked of him. Annoyance was as genuine an answer as Barba had to Carisi’s oft-made request that Barba join him, that Barba open his fist and give the Church a second chance, that Barba _try._

The subject had risen to the height of arguments in the past. 

_It’s not for lack of effort,_ Barba had insisted last they’d breached the issue. His tone had been curt, his words moreso. _It’s a choice. One I made freely and after much consideration. Your presumption that I’ve damned myself to Hell on a lark is tiresome. Why don’t you **try** to **can it.**_

Although assured in his reasoning, Barba had felt ugly about the exchange, afterwards. He’d apologized--in his way--but had hoped (still) that the matter was lost to the dark depths of common courtesy. 

Carisi wasn’t one for that. Acknowledgement was Barba’s hope, but adherence was a pipedream.

“You know it makes me uncomfortable,” Barba answered simply. He didn’t want a repeat of last time, which had seen him red-faced and huffy. 

And as Barba course-corrected, so too did Carisi.

“I wish it didn’t.” 

Gone were the incessant pleas that he’d appreciate it _now,_ with _hindsight._ With _distance._ That reconnecting with anything lost from youth could be worthwhile, if he _let it be._ Carisi’s arguments presupposed Barba missed anything about the Church, or that his life was somehow lacking without the routine. 

And even then, Barba’s routine had never been Carisi’s, even if they did share a scripture. 

( _Oh, so you'd go so far north you can't see the skyline, and attend the Spanish service at Our Lady of Refuge?_ Barba had once asked, a great sweeping pivot to show Carisi his true intentions. Of course, Carisi only brightened, and answered in complete honesty, _I'd love that._ )

For the first time in the entire stretch of this one conversation--inasmuch as it existed as whole, while being doled out over months--Barba did not hear that tell-tale whisper of moral superiority hitched to the Church, and one's attendance there. The disappointment in Carisi’s voice was entirely self-serving. He wanted-- _only,_ now--to share in Barba’s company in a particular place and time that gave him a sense of goodness and purpose.

Barba, ever the cynic, wondered if Carisi’s had been a long game, and here were the fruits of his labor, planted long ago, and finally ripe and ready to harvest.

And yet, like a breath, he felt himself give in. 

“I can… deal with it. On special occasions. _Rare_ occasions.” 

Barba could scarcely fathom these words parting his lips. He supposed it was well enough that the offer sounded as backhand as it felt. He recovered quickly and, hoping against hope of Carisi's long memory, pressed once more, “But please tell me that’s not your idea of _fun._ ” 

“I like what we do together,” Carisi insisted, and maneuvered himself so that one of Barba’s long, heavy arms came to wrap around his shoulders and draw him near. Carisi pressed his nose into a dusting of chest hair and was content. 

“But, you know, _since you asked…”_ Carisi couldn’t keep the grin off his face, much less the childish eagerness from his voice. “I bet you’ve never been to a Rangers game, huh?” 

“And your true intentions are revealed,” Barba drawled, feigning devastation. “I’m ashamed to have fallen so easily for the church thing, now. I didn’t know you were only getting started. What next? Bowling?” 

“Okay, seriously, you mock me, but you’d _love it,_ ” Carisi said, but buried his face again in Barba’s side to keep the truth from being read naked from his giddy expression. “Me and my law school buddies still have an informal league going.”

“Sounds like a certified travesty,” Barba said dismissively. Then, realizing this was the first he was hearing that these games still went on, he asked, “When was the last time you played with them?”

It even _sounded_ juvenile. 

The question seemed to stall Carisi's thinking, so that his answer was fraught with uncertainties. 

“S’been awhile, I guess. Couple of--well, shortly after you.”

“Pleased though I am to establish myself as a bonafide _era_ in another person’s life, I hope this break in your illustrious bowling career is not on my account.” The faux sincerity continued as Barba added, “I'd never ask you to choose between me or bowling.”

“Sounds like you already know the answer,” Carisi teased, his voice solemn even if his sentiment was farcical. 

Barba made himself all sharp elbows when he next moved to retrieve his phone again. He gave the offhand suggestion: “You should give them a call.” 

His phone’s small screen was aglow with various messages, memos, and case requests, but Barba found that none held his interest. The charges in his mind were alight instead, firing on all cylinders as he considered those things that must have fallen away from Carisi as Barba made a point to bring them closer. There were fixtures he'd disturbed, certainly. Signposts that had to be moved for the sake of progress. 

Home-cooked meals didn't come cheap. 

“You don’t head home too often, either.” 

Carisi was quiet in response. 

Sometimes, Barba hated his ability to so aptly read a room. The smug satisfaction that usually found him did not now roll over his shoulders like a pleasant tune. He thought it best to remain still and steady, and be the canvas onto which Carisi could project himself. 

In response, Carisi curled inwards and gripped Barba a little tighter. 

Barba would have been lying if that didn't break his heart a little bit. 

In a soft voice governed not by planned thinking, but a simple stream of consciousness, Carisi admitted this: “I wouldn’t want you so bad if I wasn’t already the kind of person who would want you at all.”

Barba went cold.

“Excuse me?”

“Huh? Nothing.”

“No, not nothing. Unless you didn’t _say_ the same piece of bizarre rationalization I _heard.”_ There was panic in his voice--outright panic. He quelled it for the sake of his own pride, but the uncertainty bled through. “Have you been… having doubts?”

To best demonstrate his outright refusal of that notion, Carisi gave what amounted to a full-bodied shake of his head. Even his arms, which were wrapped snug around Barba’s middle, rocked gently from side to side. 

“No-- _God, no._ Not _me.”_

“Your family,” Barba realized, and was relieved for only the briefest of moments, before the facts caught up with him and he realized there was still cause for concern. 

For a generous amount of time, Barba hadn’t let himself think too deeply on why he hadn’t been introduced to Carisi’s family. He’d put two and two and _thirty years_ together and had a guess as to why. 

He intuited, too, that Carisi was upset and embarrassed that his parents weren’t receptive to the effort. And on Carisi’s part, it had been that: a colossal and outright endeavor. Every family dinner, every Mass, every shared phone call, he made illusions, or asked straightaway, offering up Barba’s company and trying to marry it loosely with his family’s own.

He got dismissals and non-answers, the occasional hedged bet.

Barba had seen those glimpses of frustration, heard fragments of carefully held phone conversations. He knew well enough that when it came to his presence in Carisi’s life, there were doubts aplenty. 

“Now’s as good a time as any to ask--will you meet them?”

Barba made a noise, something partway between a groan and an impartial hum, which altogether Carisi took to mean, _convince me._

He continued, as if adamant to prove he had a plan, “Sunday. We do this around the Holiday’s--try to be together, you know, in case something comes up and we’re not, on Christmas. Kind of my ma’s marching orders.” Nevermind that they usually _were_ together for Christmas, with one exception on Carisi’s part--as a rookie, he’d worked his first year, something his family had not let him forget. 

“Church and brunch. Will you come?” 

Barba still felt distinctly nauseated by the suggestion. He wanted to plead for neutral ground--or at least, something that seemed that way. A restaurant, and he’d pick up the tab, and everyone would be bound to civil social conventions.

“She’s invited me?” 

“Is that a yes?” Carisi asked, excitement already creeping into his tone. “It’ll be great. You won’t even have to talk to them for most of the morning. They’ll just see you looking all good and pious.”

“I am neither.”

“And then we’ll all go for a meal, which will be total chaos. It’ll be great.”

“I’m not expecting great,” Barba stipulated. He realized then he’d given up without a fight, and what’s more--he’d never fully committed to waging one at all. 

He made a weak attempt, really, in an attempt to prod for more details. He wouldn’t knock down the barricades, but he’d get a look at the mounting forces aligned against him. 

“But are you sure it’s time? Six months--”

“A year,” Carisi interjected. He was adamant where Barba chose to waffle. “They’ve known for a year, even if they couldn’t put a face to it.” There, finally, was a settled thought. “And don’t you go thinking I don’t know it’s crazy that it’s taken this long. I _know._ ”

“Okay,” Barba allowed, ceding the point. Then, realizing he’d still not provided Carisi with an answer, added quickly, “Yes, of course.” 

There was no outpouring of gratitude, no assurances of a good time to make it all worthwhile. Carisi only nodded, like he’d expected nothing less. 

Barba sat up to his elbows, and did not succeed in keeping a trademark wrinkle of annoyance from between his brows.

He’d expected _some_ gratitude.

“I’m a lapsed Catholic, though,” Barba said, choosing to indulge in some last-ditch complaining. A treat for himself, if nothing else. “They’ll smell it on me.”

Carisi turned and slid an arm under the wedge of space Barba had put between himself and the bed, and then drew himself up, over the man. The move was met with some surprise from Barba, but no resistance. He let himself be loomed over by Carisi, and did not sink flat to ease his stature. Their noses met. Barba sensed a challenge.

“Under all that cologne?” Carisi grinned, and nipped at Barba’s throat to drive home his point. “No way.” 

Barba kissed him hard on just the corner of the mouth, gnashing teeth against lips before softening his approach, opening that man’s mouth and venturing in. 

They met and they parted--over and over--but Carisi felt Barba’s eyes on him in a way that wasn’t entirely lustful. They were sharp, even for being half-lidded and swept under the shadow of his brow. He was searching for something--still--and Carisi felt vulnerable enough. Barba picked up on it easily, and whether he intended to or not, exploited that fact. 

He got his fingers into that open wound, and peeled back the flesh, exposing red meat and bone.

“You’ve been quiet, lately.”

Carisi wiped at his slick lips with a thumb, wary of drool. 

“Is that a compliment?”

“No,” Barba said, and meant it. “Just an observation.” He feared it was something he’d done, some tariff on joy he’d imposed that had cut Carisi’s chatter by half. He found he missed the noise. 

Barba continued, “I’ll ask, you know. How you are. And once I ask, you’ll have to answer me.” 

Carisi gave a sideways smile--soft, undiscerning, just how Barba liked them. “And that’s a threat?”

“A big one,” Barba stipulated, and then was quiet. He was of a mind to silence the room so profoundly that whatever Carisi said or tried to say, it would be heard. 

“Everything’s been said, you know?” 

This time, Barba was careful not to jump all over a deceptively simple answer. He let it sit for a time, maturing as Carisi felt no need to amend it, but let it stand on its own right.

“That’s why you’re not jumping out of your skin to get the last word? Because you’ve come out?”

“Kind of?” Carisi said, but still did not retreat. “I guess… it mattered more than I ever realized.” 

Carisi left the bed and drew on a t-shirt to join the otherwise scarce wardrobe of only his boxers. Barba frowned instinctively.

“I'm gonna put the leftovers away,” he said, and Barba nodded in response, and started to sit up as well. 

“No, you stay. Right here. Where I can find you.”

Barba raised a speculative brow. Carisi was many things sexually--and accomplished, too, in his fair share--but even in jest, him telling Barba what to so lacked even the slightest air of credibility, the scene might as well have played out in space. 

“There’s not an apartment in my price range I could get lost in,” Barba sighed, but kept the ruse afloat. He reclined in bed, stretched an arm back and made himself open and inviting. The curve of a bicep was explicitly masculine, even if Carisi knew the skin there for soft and warm. 

“I’ve looked.” 

“I’d be happy with you in a cardboard box,” Carisi said, grinning at the image as it came together in his mind.

Barba scoffed. “Four walls, no ceiling. Do you know how to treat a man or what.”

“I made you dinner, didn’t I?”

Barba couldn't help himself--he smiled. Soft, charmed, and lit by a warmth kindled deep in his heart. “You made me dinner.” 

Carisi left to tend to the kitchen but--expertly deployed tenderness aside--Barba did not stay put. He went to his bathroom, where he washed his face, brushed his teeth, and did all those things Carisi--in his unrepentant youth--balked at. He applied those few, expensive potions and creams that promised the impossible: to tighten, glow, relieve tension, and if all else failed--to stall the march of time. 

The routine was tiresome. Barba was tired. 

There were lines and dark, sweeping circles that did not lessen with the sleep they so signaled for. And the grey in his hair, though distinguished when drawn artfully into place, when untended looked much that way itself. A long-forgotten field where all that was once managed within an inch of itself no longer knew how to live, and so grew until it died. 

Barba knew he was being dramatic, but the reality still found him as unfair. If he looked to his father for anything, it was that thick crop of dark hair that survived even chemotherapy, and went with the man to his grave. 

Barba took a last look in the mirror then gave it up.

He lingered in the bathroom’s main doorway, saw Carisi pull a neat collection of Tupperware containers Barba was _certain_ he'd never bought and secure the leftovers. Barba watched him wipe down the tabletop and stove, and set the dishes in warm, soapy water to soak. 

Curiosity found him--as it often did--like a crudely-sharpened broom handle boring into his side. _Specifically_ that, because the pain was just familiar enough that it _should_ feel like an everyday item corrupted and used against him. 

Doubt did not trouble Barba so regularly now, and this alone took its place: why?

_Why Carisi?_

Why did this man anchor himself in Barba path, and make Barba’s head turn to see him? 

Why, and _how?_

How had he done that from the very start, and Barba denied and resisted for so long? 

A year was nothing to sniff at, and yet here Barba was, longing after time past. 

Barba had long assumed what he’d have in a partner would mirror what he strove for in life: order, success, formality. 

Carisi had none of these qualities, at least not in the shape and color in which Barba imagined them. Order and success would undoubtedly come for the younger man, Barba thought, but only after he determined his passion. Despite Carisi’s dismissals, Barba was certain: seeking justice or winning it were vastly different concepts.

And formality-- _well._

Carisi didn’t know the meaning of the word.

Barba watched Carisi move about the small kitchen space as though nothing there should surprise him. That place in particular had seen more of Carisi in recent weeks alone than Barba since he’d signed the lease. 

He studied how the low light of the room darkened Carisi’s hair and brightened his eyes. Either Carisi _was_ happy or he looked it; he could never manage both. Barba had the gut feeling that their minds had drawn over the same uneven turf. 

“The way you felt at fifteen.” It was--somehow--a complete thought. Barba murmured it into the empty air, and it spread to reach every crevice. “You didn’t come up with that all on your own. And no _one_ person inspires that in another. It’s--institutions. It’s people.” 

He smoothed down his undershirt, suddenly compelled to look as though he had sense and stature enough to make his case.

Though, perhaps by standing half-naked in his own home, Carisi easily in his company, Barba’s place in this argument was secured.

“Your family…” 

“No, see, the guy thing? They get it now. Promise.” Carisi shook his head and displayed another rueful smile. He did not have to question if Barba caught his turn of phrase; Barba could have seen it from a mile away. “And they never intentionally--”

“Doesn’t matter.” 

“Well.” Carisi turned away from the sink and leaned against the counter. His arms came to fold across his chest and he was--all of him--skinny and slight in ways that made his height all the more self-possessed. There was much of him, yet, kept solely in his head or in his heart. He did not redistribute between the two. “I forgive them, then.”

“So easily?”

Carisi blinked in surprise. “Yeah, of course. They’re family.” 

Who needed sense when he had a heavy burden in his soul? Or logic, when there was blind faith? 

Inexplicably, Barba felt neither the rush of smug satisfaction--he’d always been right, hadn’t he? About soft hearts?--or the awful, sinking weight of disappointment. Carisi merely _was_ and _believed_ all that he had been and knew to be so. There was no shame in that, and Barba harbored no useless pity. 

He only felt curiosity again find his side, pierce his flesh and bleed him from an awkward, untenable angle. He’d always need another to patch that wound. 

“Leave it,” Barba said of the dishes, his second order of the night. 

And his third: “Come to bed.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is so, so late. I suppose I have the usual excuses: work, this terrible existence, general loss of interest in the show and these stories.
> 
> But I've planned a great deal of shit to happen for this fic, and at this point I'd rather not leave it undone. I greatly appreciate everyone who had taken the time to read and comment, and I hope to keep you entertained.

Morning arrived amidst indecipherable weather--was it snowing, or merely the wind that pushed errant flakes off of rooftops and fire escapes and into the faces of those who had set out about their day?

The distinction mattered little to Carisi, and not at all to Barba, who had warmth surrounding him, and of all things, a heartbeat. He found it in Carisi’s wrist and withstood its steady activity as he wandered through both dream and wakefulness, accepting neither as a likelier reality. 

He smiled even when Carisi groaned awake and moved.

How absurd was it to live a dream?

Carisi did not share so soft and stirring a notion. When he woke, his first thought for love was a sharp pain in the ball of his foot. He didn’t have the simple, satisfying touch of his lover’s heartbeat to start his morning; he had, instead, stepped on a used condom.

“You missed the wastebasket! Oh, _God._ It’s crunchy.” 

Carisi dropped back into bed, claiming just a small corner and bending slightly so as to massage and tend to his aching foot.

Barba rolled over and stretched out an arm to probe Carisi’s side. His own frame was languid and easy where Carisi’s was taught and curled. Barba wished at once to unfurl it, to lay Carisi out and deplete his energy, steal his breath, and give to him all he could want so that he was overstuffed with tenderness. 

Then he wanted to leave Carisi for hours to recover, and idly sip coffee in the next room while the younger man took great gasps of air until they piled deep enough inside him to fill the places Barba himself had gone.

“I need more practice,” he said. 

“Just throw underhand.” 

Barba’s prodding finger became a full tilt grip at the just the angle where Carisi’s hip jut from the band of his underwear. The flesh there blindingly white and easy to bruise--or at the very least leave red and wanting for attention. Skin and bone like that--it always looked _petulant._

_“More practice,”_ Barba insisted, and this time, Carisi did not miss his meaning.

“Not before Mass,” Carisi said, though his face went flush and there was warmth enough spreading under Barba’s hands to suggest he had to consider it. But reason--or maybe only fear--found him fast and he balked, “Jesus, never _that.”_

And when he spoke it, Barba knew: Capital M- _ass._ All his private work to undermine the severity of Carisi’s invitation and Barba’s acceptance bottomed out, and Barba was left with the daunting reality of meeting his young man’s family.

He groaned, and Carisi misunderstood him, and laughed. He stepped out of Barba’s hold, then bent to collect a lost sock and t-shirt from the floor. He did not doubt that Barba was still behind him, smiling at the familiar sight. 

And Carisi, in feeling only a sliver of the smug satisfaction Barba imbued in himself regularly, was floored by the richness of it all. From the pangs of heat and soreness fed into him, Carisi found a new capacity to withstand all that should come before joy: ache and unease and trepidation. He relished in it. 

And Barba was very much in agreement, there. 

Carisi serving himself like a meal last night had been, in Barba’s estimation, a bit of thanks for the day that would follow. Or, if Barba truly believed Carisi to be as shrewd as he knew the man was capable of being, then there was a taste of assurance on those lips, and again buried deep inside the man himself. Barba would surely not renege on his duty after partaking in its favor. 

Barba _hoped_ Carisi had it in him to be so conniving. It would serve him well, should he become an ADA.

However Carisi sought to procure Barbas attendance that morning, he needn't overexert himself. Barba had resigned himself to the fate the instant Carisi had asked it of him; he hadn't even considered affixing a similarly-weighted trade to the deal. He'd simply accepted the terms. 

If theirs was a barter system, Barba was being ransacked. 

He more than made up for it with idle complaints--or whatever, really, he could say to edge more information out of Carisi, who had been excited at the prospect but mum on the details since Friday night. And here Sunday morning, with Barba no surer for the day beyond what he planned to wear. 

“Am I just your _special friend,_ too? You prude. Isn’t there a verse about this?”

“ _This?_ No. Anyway--” Carisi’s face broke into a wide, ridiculous grin. “This here is too much religious nomenclature for under the sheets.” 

Barba rolled over from his side and onto his back, then stretched out his arms high above his head before drawing them in, demonstrating an impressive wingspan that made Carisi pink around the ears. He knew those arms for being wrapped around his middle, bracing him, leading to hands that cradled him. 

Barba smirked. Whether he was in a three-piece suit or stark naked, he knew how to work a look. 

“But by all means, let’s do some SAT Prep.” 

Carisi dropped a knee onto the bed, and sank close enough to Barba to tease out a kiss. “You never did sexy SAT Prep?”

“Oh what varied lives we’ve led.”

Barba threw off the covers in an attempt to stir himself from bed, but there was a sinking warmth there well beyond what the sheets and bedding allowed. He couldn't yet bring himself to abandon its comfort. He was better used to--and suited, he thought--watching Carisi ready himself and head out the door at some unholy hour. The view was usually taken from the bed, or sometimes his kitchen table and in increasingly obvious peeks over the pages of the _New York Times._

While Barba pondered this shifting vision, Carisi, who did not need to set an alarm to wake himself at an early hour on a Sunday--and, really, that was as red a flag as Barba had seen--collected his phone from atop the dresser, turned, and snapped a photo of Barba. In one instant, he'd documented their labored morning--his swiftness and Barba’s reticence, inclusive.

Barba immediately sat up straight, adjusting his posture as a means to best wear his indignation.

“Delete that.”

“But you look so good all… Roused.”

While Barba smoothed his hair on reflex, Carisi turned the phone on himself, then snapped a picture of his own open-mouthed, goofy smile while he still had Barba glowering in the background. He seemed even more pleased with the coupled result.

“We look damn good.”

“How you’ve not become picture-shy is a slap in the face to evolutionary science.” 

“I’m resilient.”

“The word you’re looking for is ridiculous,” Barba muttered, but got out of bed all the same. As he began to throw off the covers and straighten the sheets, he made a final, pointed argument. “Remind me again how many times you’ve lost your phone? Delete it.” 

Carisi rolled his eyes and, though he thumbed at his phone in an effort to appease Barba, all he really accomplished was setting the image to his wallpaper. 

“You’re gonna treasure these moments, you know. When you’re old.”

“What, you think I’ll have a change of heart by this afternoon?” Barba leaned over the bed to take hold of an errant pillow, and then tug smooth a corner of sheet. He didn’t like them to wrinkle unnecessarily. 

But even then, those finicky particulars in life did not mandate his whole body, which he applied in great stretches as he very much _performed_ the task. 

Yet, when he spied Carisi’s attention drawn to his phone, Barba was remiss to learn he was without an audience. 

“Are you completely witless?” Barba asked, and did Carisi the service of looking at his own ass, bent as it was as he fussed over the bedsheets. It was-- _Barba was_ \--an open invitation. 

“Do you know me at all?” Carisi returned, smirking at the vision of Barba fixed on his phone’s glossy screen. “I’ve been taking video this whole time.”

-

 _Not before Mass_ proved to be more of a suggestion than a rule.

-

Barba wasn’t entirely oblivious to the extended Carisi clan; he knew _of_ them, as they were a favorite point of discussion for Carisi. More than abstract thought or reason, he first had to start with a subject, and the members of his family were his oft-visited well of input. Barba found it almost curious: a discussion of politics first stemmed from what his parents believed, and how Carisi’s own thoughts were a deviation from their norm. 

He was very much still their child, very decidedly so. It wasn’t so wild a concept, only different, as Barba’s upbringing had been such that he longed to be on the same level as his mother, and she gladly met him there in time. Carisi had not yet met his parents anew, much less with the appreciation that they were all adults. 

Beyond that dynamic was another--this one wholly alien to Barba, who did not have any siblings to contend their respective realities with, either as children or adults. And Carisi could not mask the obvious fact that Bella was his favorite sister, someone he still cared for much as he always had in their youth, but saw now for what she was: a young mother. And coupled with that identifier was her child, a kind of masterwork come to gurgling, crying life. 

Bella was brash and loud and opinionated, and _so much like her older brother_ that sometimes it unnerved Barba to see them together. She was such a part of him, and in viewing their undeniable closeness, Barba felt like what he was: a chosen attachment. He didn’t have roots like Bella, he couldn’t. It was less that he wanted their relationship--never _that._

They threatened to _spit_ on one another. 

Rather, Barba wanted her ease. He wanted the assumption Bella lived with, the knowledge that her and Carisi’s love for one another was intrinsic and without question. The innate understanding that whatever wrong one might do, it wasn’t too great so as to rise higher than the other’s forgiveness. 

Realistically, Barba knew it was too much to ask for. If they’d lived a lifetime together--certainly. But the sole investment of a year promised little save for clemency, perhaps, should he ever exact a particularly cruel injustice. 

Barba smoothed down his suit front, finally satisfied with his choice of color and patterns, and the look they assumed together. He looked the picture of confidence and well-earned success, which was more than he’d ever so much as thought to achieve for a Sunday morning. Even the odd brunch date with his mother called for little more than jeans and a clean shirt. 

If there was any logic to the world, he was earning heaps of goodwill with this charade.

Well before Barba had finished showering and dressing, he could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen. Carisi prepared it strong--a nod to Barba's line of questioning from the previous night. He had given some thought to Mass as he’d known it--an excruciatingly long prison sentence that, in actuality, lasted only a scant half hour. Barba mistakenly believed it longer, but that was on account of Eddie, who’d been an altar boy at his abuela’s behest. 

Barba remembered hanging around, keeping Eddie company while he sweated through his duties, and--naturally--teasing him after his _hermoso vestido._

After he’d rehashed fond memories of making Eddie laugh despite his nerves, Barba recalled the service that followed, and the backs of everyone in his community, bent forward in prayer while the priest--a man not from the neighborhood--talked in circles and lulled even the most pious to sleep. 

Even then, people grew restless or left outright at exactly that thirty-minute mark so as to return to their homes and businesses, or to catch the latest possible train into Manhattan, where their low wages seemed to not see faith, but color.

With that in mind--and a glance at his watch to read the late hour--Barba had asked Carisi, _How long do these things typically last in Staten Island?_

And when Carisi hemmed and hawed--he guessed Barba had done some rudimentary math based on the Wednesday evening services Carisi sometimes attended--Barba came back fast with, _I googled it. Ugh._

So Carisi made coffee, and served it as the necessary stimulant it was.

“How’s it taste?” 

“Like austerity,” Barba said, but drank it anyway. “Do you think I’m going to slip into a coma?”

The third sip hit him hard, and Barba had to run water from the facet into his mug--an ugly solution, true, but the most expedient. 

“Because, just a heads up--I may have a coronary instead.” 

“Okay, well, don’t interrupt the service if it’s just palpitations.”

“Perish the thought.” 

Carisi smiled to himself. Barba’s effort was not lost on him.

“You look amazing.” 

Barba had dressed up for church, which was somehow a departure from how handsomely he outfitted himself, regardless of the occasion. The lines were that much sharper, the details drawn with distinction. The only thing more precise than the tailoring of his suit, the knot in his tie, or the edges of his cufflinks was the smirk playing on his lips--well earned in its own right, but turned up for Carisi’s viewing. 

(The poor boy allowed his eyes to gape like a mouth, then travel freely from port to port, as if Barba was his entire world.)

For his part, Barba wore his attire like a pledge: _I will attend Mass for the first time in over a decade. I do this willfully, purposefully, and selfishly. I will make a good impression._

“Yes, well.” Barba tried not to show outright that he was swayed so easily with compliments and staring. “This is the best part.”

Laid on the kitchen table by his phone and keys was a beautiful scarf chosen to softly echo the priest’s brilliant purple stole--and, of course, his own lavender accents drawn throughout his grey suit. 

Barba wondered if that sort of thinking verged on sacrilegious. 

He was quite certain he didn’t care.

-

An island covered in snow was not much the paradise Barba envisioned, but driving to Staten Island and leaving Manhattan behind bore the notion into his mind, and willed it into fashion. Manhattan even seemed _warmer,_ even if only by the virtue of towering buildings to shield from the cold. 

As Barba and Carisi stepped out of their car and stood before Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, a bitter wind came through from the east. Carisi instinctively tightened his coat around himself, while Barba stood dumbly, wondering if the bone-chilling sensation wasn't a genuine outside force, but summoned from within his own being. 

The sky, too, looked exceptionally grey, and to that end accentuated the cold. Sunlight over a brisk day could make all the difference, but none was freely given. Whatever the heavens had in stock, it was as though Barba could not afford the purchase. 

With or without it, the view was this: lighter greys in the skies, darker cement on the earth, and streaks of white and black where caked snow fell from arriving car hoods and tires alike. It was the purest rendition of monochrome Barba had seen since he last had the misfortune of crossing paths with a flock of Wall Street vultures in the city. 

“A church parking lot,” Barba said for lack of anything better. Vocalizing his unease wasn't like him, but neither was attending a religious ceremony of his own free will. 

Though, with the hold Carisi had on his heart, even that was questionable. Barba may have driven them, but Carisi was giving more than directions. His hand resting on Barba’s thigh did more to get them through traffic than any advice given towards shortcuts. 

“There was a Protestant church down the street. Are we going to rumble?”

“Bad jokes,” Carisi observed. “You must be nervous.”

Barba scoffed. “I’m not.”

“Your tie’s crooked.”

 _“It’s not,”_ Barba insisted, and was right, though his hand darted to the artfully executed knot all the same. 

Someone had been overzealous while shoveling the lot’s sidewalk, and the toe of Barba’s shoe struck browned, dead grass. He’d only glanced downward for a moment--hardly enough time to register the shades of yellow painted along the very cusp of the curb--but upon raising his gaze, he saw them.

More accurately, _they appeared._

_Out of nowhere,_ seemingly, though the likelier scenario was the two neatly parked sedans at the end of the lot. They were all matched, outfitted like an army battalion in blonde hair, blue eyes, pink-tinged skin, and great jawing mouths framed by dimples. A glance to Barba’s left assured him that Carisi was indeed the tallest, but it was a fair fight with his father, who was similarly slim, but more straight-backed and old fashioned in his dress and demeanor. The man wore a flat cap much like the style Carisi himself was drawn to, but for his age seemed appropriate, and by comparison added to the standing absurdity of Carisi’s own.

Even from a fair distance, Barba gathered this: Carisi’s father seemed to like the look of things, and carried on as though the earth under his feet and the sky overhead passed inspection and was good. He was settled into the contentment of his age, hardfought though it was. His movements--easily confused for leisurely--were slow, and spoke to a lifetime of hard work and labor. He trailed behind the others. 

It was only this that differentiated himself from his son, who had an unchecked propensity to leap and bound ahead. 

What kind of gift was it, then, that Barba should see a glimpse of Carisi’s future? And wonder--very naturally--if he should be that figure in front, carrying on a conversation in which Carisi was slowly falling behind? 

And wouldn't that be nice?

Barba banished those thoughts. They were altogether too dear and lofty, and unfinished besides. Barba could scarcely imagine a life outside the city. Where would he find these great, grey open spaces? 

The sisters--and there were many--were lovely and leggy, their heads thrown around into animated conversation. Gina and Theresa were taller than Bella by a head, but were similarly slim, with smart looks on their faces and sweater sets, mittens, and parkas to match. 

Carisi’s mother-- _Ma,_ always, in conversation--was a classic beauty, softening now in her age and her pleasing status as a grandmother. And she was the anomaly of the bunch: brunette, though it was beginning to lighten considerably with age. Streaks of grey--and Barba, having his own, knew this--were winning the battle. Though at least for the matriarch, there was product enough in her hair to keep it shining and dark. 

The whole crowd of them were talking over one another, between one another, all pages of the same book warped and set too closely together. 

And much as they spoke, they saw the world in tandem. First, in seeking out their familiar kind--and, granted, Carisi was _waving,_ a wide swing from the hinge of his elbow, though Barba’s first instinct was to press for calm and patience--they altogether set their gazes on Carisi, meeting him with freely-given adoration. 

Then, as though it followed the tilt of the earth, their attention shifted, settled like uneven ground on Barba.

Surprise had an odor. It was deodorant and cologne activated along humble human skin as it awoke to a danger. Though Barba doubted it smelled powder fresh, he would wager that this activity remained unchanged for a millenia. Animals sensed the changes in their environment, and for their own well-being, first considered them threats. 

Something that did not differentiate between man or beast was this: coupled with surprise was the unexpected. 

_Always._

“I was not invited,” Barba said, his voice strangely calm for the sudden wave of terror that overtook him. 

Carisi’s was very much the same when he replied, uncertain, “I thought you’d roll with it.”

“When have I _ever?”_ Barba snapped, and fell a step behind Carisi to properly lament his misfortune in as much solitude as he could take for himself. He wanted for a sinkhole to open in the parking lot and disappear him from the scene of what felt to be his own execution. Being walked blind into a baited trap, surrounded by wolves--it seemed no less a thing than certain death.

Carisi had to tug him onwards, and Barba did not know what to think about that.

Uselessly ahead of the grand double doors, fit with stained glass telling of saints and saviors, he muttered a decades’ late, “Oh my god.” 

“Relax,” Carisi said, and Barba felt like it was instruction enough for the both of them. Carisi took Barba’s hand in his own and squeezed. 

Feeling decidedly petulant--because not only had he been dragged to church, but under false pretenses, no less--Barba pulled an appropriately childish move, and flexed his hand, so as to release himself from Carisi’s grip. 

“No,” Barba said, and loathed himself for such defeatism. He tried to rally himself, but failed. 

It was just as well. How could anyone charge themselves, smiling, into what was assured humiliation?

“Ugh. Goddamnit.” 

“Hey, not at church.” 

“Oh, I’m _sorry._ ” Barba snapped, then amended, _“Fuck.”_

They were met with a rash of good fortune in the form of a honking horn and the screech of tires. The funeral march towards Carisi’s parents and older sisters was interrupted by the arrival of a green Honda Civic, and in it--Bella, Tommy, and their infant daughter Beatrice. Sonny was gamely sidetracked, and Barba followed suit, even if only to stand idly by while Carisi focused in on the mission control-esque gears, adjustable straps, clips, and buttons on the child’s car seat. 

Barba spared a surreptitious glance at the rest of the family, and found they’d likewise stalled ahead of the church, and were again speaking feverishly amongst themselves. Barba read discontent by the very cut of their mouths. 

He felt the sharp, unconscionable sting of self-consciousness as he took stock of what they must be seeing with all their blatant staring. 

The suit he’d so artfully chosen was suddenly a gaudy lure. The grey in his hair was something he’d been too generous about, too quick to excuse its presence, and under a scrutinous eye would surely gleam white. The lines on his face weren’t charmingly hard-won, but devastating. 

And the violet of his scarf was another unnatural gain. Like himself by Carisi’s side--it was a bemusement. 

Barba shook his head, demanded better of himself. He termed this an order, but privately it felt little more than a plea.

He turned away in time to be startled into Tommy, who greeted him animatedly, and used both hands to shake Barba’s one, effectively enclosing the gesture. They exchanged words--simple pleasantries--though anything Barba said, he could scarcely recall. The moment was lost to him fully, as his thoughts and intentions were lingering elsewhere, stalled in the path from which he’d deviated. 

Next, Bella met him with uncontestable excitement.

The young couple’s pleasure at seeing him was genuine, though Barba could not imagine how or why. He was a pivotal figure in a very difficult time for them, and--if memory served--he had not been particularly kind or considerate. Of Tommy, Barba only wanted his focus, his honesty, and a worthy performance on the stand.

And while he gave the first two in generous amounts, Tommy squandered the last, most important piece of the puzzle, and Barba had not offered a kind word, but instead written him off, and focused on whatever else stood to save their case.

He hadn’t spared a thought for Bella at the time. Anything beyond having her as a sympathetic face in the gallery was well outside his purview. Barba remembered Carisi making the appropriate introductions after he’d agreed to the case, and generally being the go-between.

Yet, for so personal a matter, Barba recalled an insurmountable distance. It was as though, beyond Tommy’s day in court, he’d scarcely been in the same room as these people. 

Bella and Tommy remembered the situation differently, and after time enough together to understand all that had occurred and the enormity of their win--despite its limitations--they saw the ordeal through the backend of their own triumph. 

And Barba was a part of that.

According to Carisi, Bella had reasons to adore Barba besides. She’d heard all of Carisi’s own glowing talk after his legal presence, his knowledge, his charm and dry wit. When Carisi expressed an interest in some new suits and brought his sister along for her opinion, she found it wasn’t the only one Carisi was open to. Her brother had drawn inspiration enough from Barba, and in turn made all the smart choices. 

To say she was pleased to see him, then, was an understatement. Though, for as much as Barba felt beloved by her, he wondered if it was just a lurid fascination. He was nothing at all like the man _she_ loved--Tommy, who was homely and kind and soft-spoken.

Barba was none of those things--particularly kind--without some genuine effort. Still, Barba liked Bella, and knew in her he had someone on his team. 

She met him fast with an all-encompassing hug. Her small frame masked some considerable strength, and Barba was winded as a result. 

“Oh, _man._ Sonny said he was gonna bring you, and I didn’t believe him. Thought he was _nuts._ Bringing the boyfriend to _Mass?_ I got knocked up before me ‘n Tommy were married, and even _I_ knew better than to try _that.”_

Barba took care to straighten his suit when they parted. “Your confidence is overwhelming.”

She swatted his arm, then leaned in close to share a secret. 

“Hey, you don’t breathe a word of this, or I’ll gut you, but--Tommy isn’t Catholic, either.”

 _“I’m--”_ Barba started to object, but couldn’t finish that sentence. Being raised in the faith seemed to matter more than any lack of practice of it. 

It was much the same as being poor, Barba thought. He’d grown out of it, away from it, and put a cavalcade of savings and stock options between him and the ghettos lining Jerome Avenue. 

This, the same as he’d put the law and new thoughts of morality and justice between himself and the Catholic church. But they were only levees, built up to guard him from well-worn dangers--nothing innate. Barba had laid the stone and sandbags himself, but always feared he’d done so with incapable hands.

He supposed, too, that his reticence to even come to Mass should excuse Bella’s knowing any better. He was sure there was a whole host of other clues--some genuine, others wrongly assumed--that should deny Barba from the very ranks he’d sought to desert. 

“I was raised Catholic,” he settled on at last. Surprise opened up over Bella’s face--just a flash, like flood lights spilling over a moonish surface.

 _“Really?”_ she balked, but soon had the propriety to look embarrassed. 

“Oh, sure. I know all the moves,” Barba assured her. And he even managed to fool himself into a little confidence. His being unwanted could not throw him anymore than all the performative kneeling and gesturing strewn throughout a service. He was a practiced hand at all of that.

Carisi had relieved Bella's child from the car, securing her tiny hat and mits, the likes of which Barba recognized immediately as being the matching set _he_ bought for some reason or another. A birthday, he imagined, though he'd concocted cause to avoid the actual event. 

(If he'd known his gifts would be a hit, he'd have gone.)

Barba remembered that there had been a blanket, too, and as sure as the fact lit like a beacon in his thoughts, Tommy drew the thing from the car. One corner in particular was wet and gnarled, a sign of being well-loved.

Bella waved off Carisi's attempt to hand the child back. 

“Hold her, huh? She’s getting so big, it’s killing my back.”

Carisi seemed all too pleased to keep the tiny, sleeping being in his arms, and even inched towards Barba to show him. 

“Don’t hand me that,” Barba dismissed, his ire still roused and readily met. He caught himself, corrected, “Her.” 

Then, after plastering on his best face and reaching for his most inoffensive tone, Barba asked of Bella, “Does she make it through an entire service?”

Bella hung her head in mock-shame. “Not one yet.”

“Aw,” Barba offered uselessly, and then to Carisi he murmured, his tone soft and conspiratorial, “Hand her to me then. I’ll make a break for it.” 

Carisi smiled at the thought. “You’re gonna take Bea on the lamb?” 

“I’ll take Beatrice as far as the front steps,” Barba decided. “This is a church, after all. Someone will take her.” 

They started walking again towards the church doors, where the rest of Carisi's family was waiting. Carisi’s mother was literally wringing her hands, and while Barba supposed the cold could account for that much, he wasn’t inclined to believe luck was on his side. 

She looked positively _stricken_ with the notion of what she would be confronted with, and Barba suddenly felt the same. 

“Carisi,” Barba sighed, very much in a tone of _Yes, we’re back to formalities._

“I’m sorry,” Carisi said, and realized even then it would be a phrase he’d return to many times that day. “It's just--when I asked, they never answered. So.”

“Couldn’t have taken that for a sign, now could we?” 

“It wasn’t fair,” Carisi insisted. He'd gone undeniably quiet, perhaps in the company of Bella, but Barba couldn't be sure this wasn't out of recognition for his own deeds, either. 

“Neither was this,” Barba said, still forcing a smile. He squared his shoulders and readied himself for battle. This involved seemingly little--a quick intake of breath, the slight incline of his chin to better showcase his supposed ease--but Carisi knew better. Barba didn’t feel any of the confidence he’d imbued into his form and figure. 

“Put the baby away. If there’s not armor enough for the both of us, we’re going in stark naked.”

“That’d make for one hell of an impression,” Carisi joked. But he was a little sallow in the cheeks, having come to the same realization as Barba that perhaps this was a foolish endeavor, and his desire to see it done had blinding him to the good sense of planning it through. 

Where Carisi reigned in the strength of his stride, Barba only set himself more firmly in the unmistakeable reality coming to meet them--orthopedic insoles, stiff joints, and all.

So focused on mounting his resolve and making something from it, Barba missed Carisi’s handoff of the baby, and the comment that went with it.

“Hey, Tommy, take her, huh? I’ve got my hands full with this one.”

For the step he’d surrendered only moments ago, Barba took two more, and set himself ahead of the pack.

He said, “I’m going to introduce myself.” 

-

Barba realized immediately that, despite his charm and way with words, this was the kind of thing he should have practiced. He’d created question trees to put the nation’s oldest redwoods to shame, and as to why he had not built such a contraption--even idly, to pass the time during his year with Carisi--Barba could not fathom. With the same depth of thought and flexibility of mind he afforded his legal proceedings, he _should_ have imagined every possible outcome, and readied himself with a response to--what?

As it happened, the matriarch Carisi gave him nothing. And Barba floundered.

His bright smile went unmet. Barba felt as though he was groping around a dark room, having found a doorframe but no actual break in the wall. He did not dare reach or hope for anything more, after that. 

“Catherine, it's a pleasure to finally meet you.”

He paused, just the barest breadth of a moment’s opportunity for her to echo his sentiment. 

_Nothing._

More platitudes, even the blatant lie, _Sonny’s told me so much about you,_ said as if drawn from a stream of consciousness, fed by panic and an instinct to hit the right notes and hear the desired response.

_Nothing._

Then, so as not to suffer more silence, Barba added, “I'm Rafael Barba.”

He thought to tell her she looked like Ava Gardner--which she did, though much could be chalked up to the red lip and the styling of her hair into such a shape as to echo long-lost heydays where beauty was exacting and practiced--but held his tongue. He had concerns that they believed him to be an old Lothario, if for nothing more than the warm accents on his name and the smile he used to cater to his needs. An unfair reading or not, Barba chose to err on the side of caution.

As a last-ditch effort, he extended his hand. Bare, where hers was gloved. It was a crude calculation, but the math fell in his favor.

She accepted his hand to shake and returned a faint, “Oh. Hello.” 

It was the sound one made when blowing dust off a bowl. A soft, empty echo of nothing in particular, just warm air breaking as it met a true presence in the physical world. It was a response so lacking in its own self, Barba would have preferred deafening silence in its place. 

Her stare set itself on her son, with weight enough, Barba thought, to crush him. Carisi smiled and shrugged, a move he'd surely often deployed in his youth. Though he'd not long been the baby of the family, he had some unmatched leeway as the only son. 

And this was a boy asking permission, forgiveness, and kindness all in one fell swoop.

While Barba was momentarily astounded by the boldness of the maneuver, it was the _sheer stupidity_ that would stay with him for days.

Catherine, Barba decided in a moment of shrewd playmaking, was a lost cause. He could not recover from dead silence, only fill it. So he turned his attention to Carisi’s father--the original Dominick, Barba had to remind himself--and found the man’s gaze already trained on him. Even from behind a set of horn rimmed glasses--a tortoiseshell design only recently made stylish again--his blue eyes held great focus, thought, and strength. 

And although he'd seen pictures, Barba could not have prepared himself for the striking resemblance. Father and son shared a name, which defined a man well before the things he sought to do, or did. Beyond that, they shared jawlines and noses and--Barba hoped--the same innate kindness to guide them into the arms of nature’s better angels. 

The wind picked up--a surprise, given the relatively stillness of the cool, grey morning. Barba felt the cold air braze the side of his head and imagined a bullet. 

There was a time he would have winced at the thought, the very-near fate that orchestrated itself like a memory despite never fully coming to pass. It wasn’t therapy that kept the pained expression off his face--only practice. 

“Mr. Carisi,” Barba greeted, making the introduction before the moment overtook him and Carisi intervened on his behalf. Despite his regression into titles--he’d very much intended to tread lightly with first names--Barba kept his smile perfunctory and assured. He pretended as though he could overcome the surprise on all parties’ sides that they might finally meet outside a Catholic church, stood in the shadow of a grand tower, under grey skies, and _months_ beyond what should be deemed acceptable.

“Mr. Barba,” Dominick Sr. replied. Barba heard it very nearly for a joke--a bit of dry wit for which Barba was instantly appreciateive. At least it was something.

They shook hands, their grips matched for strength and assurance. Dominick Sr.’s naturally so, and Barba’s due to his overcompensating. Deep in his bones, he still felt as though he should not be here--not before religious relics, and not meeting the parents of a lover. Most of what Barba wanted in life boiled down to one thing: dignity. It was the smooth bit of glass at the core of his ambition and showmanship. He used both to cushion that fragile prize. 

Dignity was not a thing he’d ever felt in church, or from those who kept their place in one. 

Barba kept those thoughts off his face as he regarded Carisi’s older sisters, of whom Barba knew little beyond Carisi's telling. 

There was Gina, who was successful in all things but love, where she had an overabundance of failure in the form of no fewer than eight engagements--four of which she'd kept the ring. She wore them, sometimes, like the bizarre trophies they were. The spoils of war, she’d decided, were well-earned, though they did little to mend her oft-heavy heart.

And Theresa, who had the opposite problem. Rather than giving her heart to every man that stirred something in it, she kept her wits about her, and held fast to a staggering list of demands. She was skeptical, too, even of those who rose to meet them. 

The very concept of delayed gratification owed her a profound debt of gratitude, because she'd mastered the art.

They both regarded him with some scrutiny, looks that mirrored their mother’s. 

Carisi--either worried they’d say nothing to Barba, or terrified that they _would_ \--spoke up.

“I thought, you know, on account of everyone’s busy schedules, this would be a great time for you to meet Raf. For Raf to meet all of you.” 

Theresa rolled her eyes and said to Gina in a stage whisper, “They gave this idiot a law degree?”

Understandably distracted, their mother answered with an offhand, “Gina, that’s not nice.” 

Theresa grinned like a child for getting away with the slight. 

Catherine smoothed the plait of her scarf and said with a breathless voice that echoed her confusion, “Okay. Well. Let’s take our seats.”

Carisi brought a hand to rest on his mother's arm, just below the curve of her shoulder. It was a comforting touch, and again, Barba was reminded of all the things that Carisi had assumed from his parents. Well beyond their looks, he'd come away with a profound sense of empathy.

Admittedly, it was the recessive gene, and tribalism won the day.

“Ma, what about a coffee first?” Carisi asked, and pointedly turned to Barba to explain: “We always get here a little early and get a coffee at this place around the corner. We talk, we catch up. It’s fun.”

“A coffee sounds great,” Barba replied, shooting for mild but falling so, so far short. 

“I think I’d like to take my seat,” Catherine said, and was already looking off and away, as if she expected a swooping rescue from this meeting. “Perhaps speak with Father Romano again…”

Carisi’s shoulders sagged. “Ma…” 

“Kitty,” Dominick Sr. echoed, his tone much like his son’s--quite possibly the source. Neither endearment stayed the woman’s departure, however, and she was gone. Her daughters went with her, and even Bella joined chase, though she went with every intention of pleading her brother’s case. Tommy went after her, their baby’s blanket in hand. 

He would be wise, Barba thought, to stay out of it.

Barba watched her disappear into the church and supposed there was some karmic justice in the fact that he would be denied on the steps leading to the very house of faith he’d kept at arm’s length. 

“Dad,” Carisi said, and if at all possible, he seemed undeterred. _Worse,_ he was more hopeful still that his father would take the bait, as if he hadn't just seen the successful example of another’s evasive measures. “Will you come have a coffee with us?”

Barba took care to angle himself _just so,_ and did not look at the older man as he answered--and ultimately disappointed--his son.

Barba did not care either way, and his artful disinterest would be something Carisi could someday look back on, understand, and emulate. _Don't lay your feelings at their feet_ was the lesson. 

_They'll only ever be stomped on._

Dominick Sr. did his stomping with a new weight over his brow, and a light touch on his son’s shoulder. 

“I should see after your mother,” he said, and left. 

_Good,_ Barba thought, bitter superiority rising like groundwater to fill the crater left by his decimated confidence. 

Carisi must have had some inkling of what he’d led them both into, because he waited until his father had cleared earshot before addressing Barba.

“Don’t be upset--”

“Oh, we are past that,” Barba replied sharply. His words were a scythe to cut Carisi apart, his stare hot enough to turn the remaining halves to bloated, stinking rot. 

But he said nothing else. His meticulous mind told him to dull his own indignation--or was it circumstance, doing that? Weighing so heavily over his shoulders that everything had come to bend forward and lose shape? Whatever goals he’d had that morning were lost--now, Barba only wanted to save face.

It was a considerable drop from where Barba had started, but family affairs had long stood before him on a cliff’s edge. Only his mother was inland, and even then--only by a few steps. His abuelita, too, had once been the center of his emotional world. Every other relation was too precarious to revisit; one wrong touch and he might fell them. 

Barba was less equipped to deal with extended relations, and was troubled in that area since boyhood. There had been a line drawn between his mother’s side and his father’s, and alliances arranged themselves thusly. Barba was split property, but never entertained the notion that his father was anything other than a cruel and evil man. Even with his efforts not to endear himself to his father’s side, his mother’s relatives had their concerns.

 _He looks just like him,_ they’d say, as if that was reason enough to write off a nine-year-old.

Carisi took Barba’s hand. Barba’s uncharacteristic silence, it seemed, had met him poorly. 

Wary of again being drawn by the hand and swept up into something far from his choosing, Barba reminded Carisi, “I only came along because you led me to believe I was welcome.” 

Carisi saw his opening and plowed through. “Everyone’s welcome in the Church--”

“No,” Barba responded at once, suddenly at a loss for even the words he’d thought better of saying. He could only repeat himself, aghast that Carisi would suggest otherwise, _“No._ And you _know that._ Don’t talk to me like I’m ignorant of things I’ve _lived.”_

Appropriately shamed, Carisi pocketed his hands, turned and shifted his weight around as if there was any extra he could hand off because it was tedious and bothersome. As if he considered such a thing possible--as if people didn’t carry their baggage constantly, and the inevitable result was strained muscles and altered skeletons. As if it wasn’t ruinous. 

“Can you just humor them?”

Barba raised an eyebrow and said snidely, “That’s your permanent solution, then?”

“Okay, no, so they’re not _there_ yet.”

“Yes, that was my take away as well,” Barba shot back. “How they came to be unstuck in time as they traveled here from the 50s.”

“I mean, _kind of--_ ”

“I don’t need you making excuses on their behalf. You should start thinking up some of your own.”

Carisi didn’t have a response for that. Barba guessed it wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought through exactly that--the fact that by obscuring his family’s position, he’d put a foot on their platform, as well--but he had not wanted to _believe_ what he _knew._

Faith allowed him that particular luxury. 

The air stood still--no wind came to distract them or alter their reality. They were stuck in the exact place they’d found themselves. 

_She wouldn’t even look me in the eye,_ Barba wanted to say, but didn’t. He knew Carisi gathered as much, and understood why that would be a problem.

“You realize, of course, that their response isn't rational.” Barba left it open as to whether he was referring to the church or the Carisi clan.

Carisi answered similarly. 

“Yeah, I got that.”

“So what possessed you to believe that being confronted with evidence would correct their thinking? They're just going to dig their heels in and--I don't know. Tear me down in your eyes.” Barba realized he hadn’t so much as predicted the future as stumbled upon the past. 

“Oh,” he drawled, “But perhaps I'm late to that particular party.”

“You gotta have faith,” Carisi insisted, though it was nearer a thing to a plea.

“Do I,” Barba said, derision dripping from his lips. From anyone else, he’d chalk such prattle up to _antics,_ but with Carisi--Barba knew he was entirely, distressingly sincere. 

“Yes. Please.”

Barba scoffed and turned away. It was a gesture he’d deployed in the past only to be lambasted as prissy, and while he’d schooled himself in his youth, Barba couldn’t bring himself to concern himself with optics, now. The vision was wholly denied, so what did the details matter? 

Perhaps Carisi’s mother _had_ made progress, and understood where Carisi’s desires would naturally take him. What she’d expected was a matching set, then--someone who looked and sounded like Carisi enough to compliment him. 

_I’m sure she despises me for a number of reasons,_ Barba supposed, angling himself towards her defense, but only hypothetically so. 

_Who knows where color coordination ranks._

Barba’s own jokes did nothing to alleviate all that he was feeling, much less relieve Carisi of the fault.

“What time is confessional?” he asked, turning back again on his heel. “Forgive me father, for I have had homicidal thoughts.”

“Raf…”

Carisi was-- _of all things_ \--still hopeful.

Sometimes, Barba couldn’t help but disappoint him.

“Just. Buy me a coffee.” 

-

Carisi, who had never met a barista he did not immediately fall into genuine conversation with, completed Barba’s request without a single unnecessary word. The foretold coffee shop was small, a chain establishment, and generally ill-placed for business. The mustard-colored tiled floors were a thing of the not-too-distant-past, telling of a previous life as a McDonald’s. As for how _that_ could fail, Barba had no clue. He guessed that the religious institution next door did not appreciate the implications of being lumped in with strip mall fare. 

Even clowns and hamburger thieves were subservient to the will of the Catholic church. 

Barba took a seat at a small table by the window, then convinced himself he was _waiting_ and not _stewing._

In part, it was Barba’s own reaction to the Carisi family that embarrassed him. He was ashamed to not have _won_ \--if not their hearts, then at least their opinions. To do this outright and immediately was very much his life’s work. It was a task he handled with practiced ease for every new jury he faced, yet a handful of people from Staten Island scorched his methods and scattered them like ash. 

He supposed he hadn’t made an argument for himself at all. In showing up unannounced, Barba had no foundation onto which he would lay his groundwork. Those smart lines and firm handshakes, the politeness he’d learned to adopt and adapt to grease any situation for a smooth passage--none were accessed to their full effect, for Barba’s own benefit. 

He’d been too cautious, and in the end had shortchanged himself. 

The coffee Carisi ordered for him was pressed into his hand. Barba registered the heat but felt nothing like warmth. There was a column of icy steel in his belly, rising up to suffocate him from within. This stalagmite of nerves had him swallowing two gulps of hot coffee in quick succession, as if Barba’s only thought was to stall the deadly fixture’s progress. 

What had he said, even? Any idiot could introduce himself, but Barba had stopped there, impressions left to whatever winds rose to carry them. 

He should have done better. 

His displeasure must have read on his face, because Carisi could no longer hold his tongue.

“Look--”

Barba raised a hand, effectively silencing Carisi before he began his denials in earnest. 

With a cool, calm tone that belied his misgivings, Barba said, “I’m sure you have all sorts of reasons for this. I don’t want to hear them right now. Thank you.” Lines dug themselves like trenches in his brow as he considered his next move. “Just. Do we have five minutes?”

Carisi nodded--a tight, short gesture that very nearly looked _painful._

“Give me four of them.” 

They sat in silence at a corner booth in the coffee shop, Barba lost in thought and swiftly-rendered plans, and Carisi--

He’d gone someplace, too. 

His gaze found the church, his spiritual home. He looked upon the stone building as if it had all the magnificent trappings of the place they’d visited in Boston. Carisi could scarcely believe things had ever been as difficult between them as they had been before that. Even with the shitstorm coming out had been, life had felt so much easier, since.

Barba loved him. Barba said so. 

And Carisi felt it everyday.

When his attention again fell upon Barba, Carisi saw the man had _chosen_ confidence, then assumed it entirely. 

Carisi felt it _now._

“Okay,” Barba said, and smoothed a hand through his hair to complete the picture of seemingly inbred cool and calm. Carisi loved, too, that he’d come to learn neither was the case. 

Barba said, “Let’s get this over with.” 

-

In returning to the church, Barba steeled himself with an easy smile and a straight-backed confidence he did not genuinely feel, but faked well enough to fool his own bodily functions. No longer did fear drip down the back of his throat and pool in his belly. His gait slowed, then sidestepped into that favorite dance: patience, fed by ease, all entirely self-contained so as to confuse any onlooker, and imbue in them the belief that a dashing man in a three-piece suit so thoroughly knew the meaning of _leisurely_ that he might find it in the confines of a church. 

Carisi led like a bloodhound to their seats among his family, who had claimed a pew. Barba was relieved to see there was room enough for him to join, and sit comfortably near the far-left aisle.

Immediately, Carisi capitalized on Barba’s unfamiliarity with the place, and began to answer for it.

“See the couple two rows up--blue sweater, white scarf? That’s my cousin Frankie and his wife Gia.”

“Okay.”

“And my Uncle Sal--” Carisi pointed nearby to a lean man with circular glasses, then a woman smoothing her hair after relieving it from a knit hat. 

“Aunt Elena--” 

Carisi looked around the room again, and it wasn’t long before he spotted still more relations. 

“Cousin Mary--” 

“Maybe this would go faster if you pointed out everyone you’re _not_ related to.” 

Carisi, perhaps expecting a joke but being thrown by Barbas tone, realized _of course_ Barba was feeling overwhelmed. Even if he'd lived a lifetime seeking a place in crowds that--if not for his wit, intelligence, and workmanship--otherwise would not have him, here was a situation as far from those Barba could aspire to.

Worse, it was a kind of regression. 

Carisi wanted to offer a simple, _“I’m sorry,”_ but worried what Barba would think of it. If he’d throw the entire day behind one word of apology, thinking the whole thing was a wash. 

He still had hope-- _faith_ \--that his family would pull themselves together and recognize their son’s intentions as earnest and worthwhile. He wanted Barba to hold fast to that expectation, too, and to see it come to fruition. 

Carisi took Barba’s hand from where he had it curled in a noose-like vice around the eggshell-colored paper program. There was talk of potluck dinners and hours at the local soup kitchen pressed between his fingers. The grip broke apart and Carisi fit himself inside. 

“You don’t have to meet any of them today. Or, if it happens, I’ll keep it short and sweet.” 

Carisi went all crooked-mouthed and bright-eyed, and Barba knew he was on the verge of making a bad joke-- _Kind of like you in that respect!_ \--but he was distracted by the older sister sat next to him.

Barba glanced towards the far corner where Theresa had pointed out someone to Carisi, who in turn had rolled his eyes. There were two older women sat at the end of a side pew, slowly unravelling themselves from their winter clothes, all of it that bulky shape of hand-knitted.

Barba asked what he assumed was a safe bet: “More family?”

Theresa snorted, but Carisi answered him earnestly.

“Ah, no. That's Diane and June… their husbands died. They're. Kind of. Lesbians now.”

Barba nodded--very much in his _receiving-pertinent-information_ face--and then, quite graciously, said to Theresa, “Well, if that's our section...?”

He even made to stand, which caused a smile to crack open over Carisi’s face, and left him ducking slightly to mask it. Bright, unfettered joy had no place amongst the dark woodwork, aged stained glass, and heady renderings of a prophet’s crucifixion. 

Just as quickly as Carisi was a bright beacon of joy and uncomplicated happiness, those signals smoothed over, and he became a shade of stern and solemn that was at once so unlike him, and yet… entirely true. Carisi’s exuberant reverence for the legends and heroes in the legal profession verged on goofy at times, so this was another look at that same swell of awe and appreciation. 

But now, among a crowd of milling and fading voices, Carisi’s attention held like the rising sun. It was a mandate all its own, and Barba could only sit in full view of the spectacle.

The service was starting.

-

The motions and setting fell into place as if drawn in from a dream. Even for never before having stepped foot in Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, Barba found he recognized the place. 

The service conducted itself like a well-practiced song, heralded by a choir's best singers. The rituals were unchanged, and even a kind of comfort in their familiarity. Barba could not deny that much. He let his mind wander in the space of them, between words that were meant to be muttered, and motions that were expected of him. He acted out the parts, and did not find himself pried apart by his own conscious forgery, there. The Church no longer had that kind of power over him, could no longer inspire doubt and feed his despair. 

He was immune.

What was there for him to betray, but his sense of denial? 

He cast the odd sidelong glance at Carisi and thought if he’d failed anyone, it was him. Hope--especially false hope--was a powerful drug. Barba worried he had Carisi taken with just one taste. He could chase and hound Barba for another, but it would all be for naught. At best, Barba would pass along placebos: the occasional utterance that he _maybe might consider_ doing this again.

But, no.

But, never. 

Barba set his shoulders and realigned his focus. He tried to look intent, not lost. Like he had every right to be there. 

He knew he looked quite the picture: an overdressed straggler amongst this idyllic family, so close-knit that they should all share the same set of dimples. Seeking belonging--even if bought like a bill of goods--Barba imagined the pews for a gallery, the choir for a jury. But the orchestration had him sitting too far out for the vision to take shape, and he quickly dismissed it. 

In a moment that seemed to happen upon him fast and then race right along ahead, Barba noticed Carisi--whose attention has been dutifully pinned to the front of the church, thus far--looking sideways at him. Barba bristled, and was worried he'd given himself away with his thinking. _How long has he been staring,_ was Barba’s first thought, but that was quickly lapped by a scrupulous, ever-present, _Why._

But Carisi was smiling sweetly, which abolished purpose altogether. He never seemed to need a reason to look upon Barba and boast a barely-there quirk of his pink lips. The best term Barba could put to it was idle fascination, met at just the cusp of confusion. 

Barba looked away first. His attention fell on that much-vaunted book, worn with the touch of countless believers. Barba did not reach for the copy before him, as he was neither curious nor desperate. 

At least--he had no intention of being seen for either.

Suddenly, without warning or provocation, Carisi spoke.

 _“I'm glad you're here,”_ he said, a whisper so hushed that first Barba spared a bewildered thought that it was a voice from within his own mind--his mother’s, maybe. His abuela’s. Someone who would care that he had once again sat himself in an uncomfortable seat, and was listening to heavenly words that for so long had dictated his life, but meant nothing to him.

But it was nothing so mystical as that--only Carisi, with a practiced ear for keeping quiet, making the most of a moment he could share with Barba in a place in which he still held in the utmost regard. 

Barba wasn't likewise as confident in his ability to render the spoken soundless, so his imagined reply--a snide, _That makes one of us_ \--was smothered to death. He said nothing, which was somehow the greater injustice.

Elsewhere in the church, someone coughed. A mother shushed her giggling children. Barba heard the heaters whurr. Despite the fact that every pew was filled, Barba acknowledged the intimacy of the space. He found himself wondering why it was that Carisi should feel welcomed here, and he could not. 

(It would take Barba the entire Mass service to arrive at his answer, and then only strike him during the slow procession out into the grey-skied day: there was no irresistable will calling to Carisi. There was only Carisi’s desire to be there, and to want to be welcomed. It was his doggedness that put him in this place, week after week. He was obeying his own faith, first, before concerning himself with anyone else’s.)

Presently, Barba’s thoughts only skirted his answer. He let his gaze shift around the room as far as his positioning would allow, so as to take in the great, dark beams of wood rising from the floor to cradle the ceiling and spread wide and curl like the bones of a ribcage. Altogether combined, those heavy braces meant to shield the church’s parishioners from an otherwise dull beige ceiling. It made for a curious sight to rival even that of the stained glass panes along the walls, from which no light seemed to find. Whether that was a virtue of the weather outside or a denial from the images themselves--what _should_ illuminate depictions of great horrors and miracles alike?--was unknown to Barba, who hadn’t--and wouldn’t--see the place on a sunnier day. 

He registered the space anew and it confounded him. Like he’d opened his eyes to a night sky under a different city, Barba could only guess at what miniscule sliver of the universe he was party to. 

The coordinates were these: _Catholic Church. Staten Island. 11am._

If he was thrown-- _hurled,_ really, into darkest space--by anything, it was the language.

Roman Catholicism, he decided, was more stringent in English. In Spanish, the saints had lovelier-sounding names, and the stories carried themselves like song rather than order.  
The use of English--and _Latin_ \--made the warnings more explicit, the tales more dire.

Barba tried to occupy his thoughts with the spectacle, but found himself lost in reflective memory. He'd been here before, countless times. Echoing these words, kneeling in sync with other parishioners, his friends, neighbors, and bullies alike. People who chased him for a seven block stretch and wailed on him when they caught him alone. Young boys who threw punches at Barba accepted communion with those same hands, unfurled, and looking unnatural for it. 

Perhaps Carisi had a point, afterall. The Church was for everyone. Abusers and their victims--it made for a convenient meeting place. 

-

“You looked sad in there.” 

It was another whispered word, soft and buzzing warm as if Carisi’s lips were pressed to Barba’s ear as he spoke them.

They weren’t. 

And, uncertain as to what to make of such an observation, Barba said nothing. He’d rather Carisi assume his petulance than bear his heart.

Many patrons took their leave, setting about their lives after this weekly spiritual requirement was met. The Carisis--and by extension, Barba--lingered. 

Barba felt foolish for it now, having already gathered his coat in anticipation of a swift departure. He held it neatly folded over one arm as he looked around, letting his attention rise and fall like a heartbeat as he studied the faces of those in this community. 

He spied Carisi's mother speaking with a man. He was older, but in his face was the promise of once-held handsomeness, the sort that a young boy might easily confuse for kindness. 

“Is that the priest?” 

Carisi followed Barba’s stare and found his mother speaking with the elderly Father Romano. 

“I know you haven’t been in a while, but, yeah. The vestments and talking this whole time didn’t tip you off?” 

“Is that _the_ priest,” Barba clarified, and watched Carisi deploy a fleeting glance in the direction of his parents. 

“No,” Carisi answered. Then, his voice quickened in panic, he started to add, “Even if it was--”

Barba interrupted him, his tone more snide than smart: “I should offer him every courtesy, I’m sure.”

Finally, the frustration Barba felt on Carisi’s behalf was worn on the man’s own face. It spanned into place as if returned for a tidy ransom. It wasn’t won or well-earned, but delivered there, as promised. 

It wasn’t as good a look for him as Barba had hoped. 

“It’s just--it’s not your place, okay? Leave it.”

Cooly, Barba returned, “None of this is my place.” 

As quickly as it appeared, the anger had all gone. Rocketed off someplace else, and Barba wondered if he could turn and see it lying in a heap across the room. It was overtaken in full by a wave of sadness and hurt, which was altogether a more familiar look for the man, much to Barba’s disappointment.

“Hey. Come on.”

Carisi put his hand on Barba’s shoulder, then lowered it, until Barba felt its presence just above his elbow. Carisi’s fingers fanned out and--slowly--his touch made its way to Barba’s back, where it came to rest with some familiarity, if not ease.

Barba supposed the kind of relationship they’d forged--the love they’d claimed for one another--would never pile itself in heaps of ease. It wasn’t in their natures to know goodness and rest in it. They had to pick it apart, inspect its workings, and know its greater purpose. Such was a reasonable conclusion: no one waded through death threats, public outings, and family tensions without an endgame in sight. But even _results_ were not the end of things, as something greater still lingered well beyond any vision of their collective futures. 

Carisi liked to think so, but Barba knew better: they could not love without consequence. 

-

When the Carisis had finally deigned to leave the Church, Barba slid up to Carisi in the parking lot with a bit of overheard gossip.

“Your mother is concerned because her reservation was for nine guests, not ten.”

“You can sit on my lap?” Carisi said, and with such a look on his face it was as though he actually thought he was being helpful. “Anyway, she’s counting Beatrice. So it’ll be a mad dash for the booster seat. You’ve got her beat, easy.”

“Get outta here with that, would ya?” Bella said, plodding up from behind, her baby weighing heavily in her small arms. 

Barba busied himself with e-mails on his phone, reading and answering messages in the hopes that someone might call and insist on his further input. He was entirely absent, then, from the flurry of conversation between the Carisi clan that had them deciding to cook at home. 

The car ride was quiet, with Carisi driving and Barba staring out the window--and inevitably frowning--at Staten Island.

Barba’s only inclination that they were approaching their destination was Carisi suddenly bursting with assurances. 

“It’s going to be fine. It was just a shock, you know? And my mom is the best cook. The _best._ You’re gonna love it, and she’s gonna love you for loving it.”

Barba gave a tight smile and nodded absently, his thumb being the most animated part of him as he skimmed e-mail after e-mail looking for even the flimsiest of excuses to see his way back to Manhattan. 

He was looking for one even as they pulled into the driveway along a suburban little cul de sac, still snow-swept and idyllic in the way New York streets only lasted for half a second.

The home was bought when such a place was affordable amongst the middle class, and kept beautiful and pristine. It was surely primed to be an heirloom, kept throughout the familial line for generations to come.

The property boasted a considerable lawn, too, though it was currently lost under several inches of snow. Barba knew Carisi had gone the first weekend back from their summer trip to mow it, after complaints from his mother that he’d let it go for too long, and his father would undoubtedly hurt himself trying to finish the task, and surely he knew better? 

_Nevermind that Carisi was thousands of miles away in France,_ Barba remembered thinking at the time. He should have taken care with that fact, extrapolated its sense and seen even then the depths of her denial. 

No snow crunched underfoot, and Barba wondered when it was that Carisi had gone home in recent days to shovel the pathway. It wasn’t among the litany of unnecessary facts Carisi shared about his day--once, that he’d recognized the scent of Barba’s shampoo in lock-up, wasn’t that funny?--so Barba reasoned it had been purposefully kept from him.

He was surprised-- _impressed,_ really--that Carisi had it in him to be sly.

Amongst the bright shutters and stone walkway, Barba even suspected something as jarring as a _backyard_ existed here. He envisioned a litany of horrors--patios and barbeque pits. An old swingset kept like a lit beacon of hope for grandchildren. 

The front of the house was decorated with strings of tiny white Christmas lights, aligned to perfection along the front facade.

More of Carisi’s handiwork, Barba guessed.

Entering the home, Barba was lost in a whirl of coats and scarves, elbows and winter boots kicked haphazardly off feet. The crowd quickly dissipated as if it had only ever been shapes drawn in fog. 

Or _steam,_ because the home was overly-warm, and the Carisis were right to shed their winter wears, or else risk immediate heat stroke. After abandoning his coat and scarf, Barba had to consider his suit jacket carefully. 

“Sonny talks about you all the time,” Gina offered while shrugging out of her fur-trim parka, same as her sister’s. 

Theresa added, “But we Googled you.”

If Barba were the optimistic sort, he’d envision that they came across the odd profile piece--an alumni interview for the Harvard Law Review that Barba was especially partial to, or the one with _The New Yorker_ \--but instead, he defaulted to reason and logic. Well before all that would be sensational stories about his own trial, or outrageous cases he’d won by equally absurd means. And Barba couldn’t count the number of ugly articles referencing him after the all-too-literal Muñoz affair.

But he played it cool. His keen, perpetually-hooded eyes carried the effort to look unperturbed, but Barba threw in an easy little smirk to see the deed done right.

“He leave you wanting for more?” 

Theresa rolled her eyes while Gina--perhaps against her better judgment--smiled. Carisi had said she was always one to be fast-taken with a fast-talker. Barba was that, and a shameless flirt to boot. He decided he could win her interest handily, and slowly turn the family tides more in his favor. 

It wasn’t an exquisite plan--neither a sensory treat nor feast for the eyes--but he’d served up miracles on the fly before. All he needed was a hint of intrigue to set things in motion.

Unfortunately for Barba, Gina was not as swift as her older sister with a reply.

“Not especially,” Theresa said, and turned away. 

This left Barba alone with Carisi--a set of circumstances Barba did not squander. 

“Take off your vest.”

“Excuse me?” Carisi sputtered. _“Here?”_

“I’m wearing mine. Take yours off, or it’ll look like I’ve _dressed you._ ”

Carisi did as instructed, and loosened--then lost--his tie for good measure. He cut a slim figure, and his hair--thrown some by the gusting wind outside--had to be smoothed down with a firm hand. There was nothing to be done for his too-pink lips and the cold marked across his cheeks like the force of a slap. 

Everything in Barba wanted to kiss those lips pinker, and make Carisi’s face burn hot, as if he took exception to it.

Barba denied himself, this time. 

“Happy?”

Barba carefully hung his suit jacket on the coat rack, then smoothed a broad hand down his vest front.

Though tone was designed to fit another response entirely-- _One would think you’d know better than to ask such a thing by now._ \--Barba retooled it in due course, and answered only, “Oh, _exorbitantly.”_

Carisi, his mother, his aunt, and his sisters departed for the kitchen to cook brunch. Tommy took Beatrice into another room so that she could continue sleeping and enjoy some quiet. Upon realizing this left him with Carisi’s father, Barba lamented not striking a better tone with the child. An _interest_ \--at the very least--might have seen him away with her.

“Dom,” Dominick Sr. said, a secondary introduction. 

“Rafael.”

“You drink?”

 _A considerable amount,_ Barba thought, but joked instead, “Only in trying times.” 

Barba followed Dom to a small study, a room only in that it was held from view by an odd corner, a bit of awkward structural work that the Carisis had smoothed over with colors that flowed from one space to the next, breathing unity into the home. Barba turned the wide corner and found the space heavy with inlaid bookshelves, and at once spied those great, weighty tomes of Walter Briggs that Carisi so adored. 

Like his height and features, a profound love for literature was another gift imparted from father to son.

Dom collected two glasses from a dark-paneled cabinet squirreled away amongst the shelves, and a bottle of something delightfully rich and brown, then gold, when the pale light drawing in from the two front-facing windows met it.

“Thank you,” Barba said as he accepted his share. He smiled, but Dom didn’t think fast enough to return it, or ever meant to give one of his own, besides.

So Barba took this down along with a shot of bourbon: Dom didn’t know any better than his wife what to make of all this--of his son’s displayed proclivities, even if he’d come to understand what was stated. His broadest effort proved fruitful, but the offer of a drink to a stately man was as far as he’d figured.

Barba took the next step himself: he explored the room. Where books parted and allowed for space, there were photos cluttering every available surface--wall, shelf, and desk alike. Family photos were the favored choice, with gazes fixed and ready, smiles set, and all those gathered positioned according to height as if such an arrangement was natural.

_Herd mentality for the twenty-first century._

Barba stalled and savored a grouping of aged photos, none of them glossy and technicolor.

“This is your study?”

“Mine and Sonny’s.”

As if he needed further confirmation, Barba saw that law books had made their way onto the walls. 

“Sonny tells me you were a firefighter, same as your father,” Barba said to Dom, who had taken his preferred seat in a lounge chair. His knees cracked as he settled in, and Barba figured he had the man’s company for as long as his body could deny the effort to sit back up. 

“Were you surprised he decided to become a cop?” 

Privately, the notion consumed Barba, who came from a community where sons assumed the identities of their fathers. It was scarcely a choice, but an evolutionary fact. While Barba had dodged his father's profession--construction and laboring jobs, nothing promised, everything agreed upon by a handshake and a nod--he feared he was due some other fates. 

Cancer was the least of them. 

“More surprised he wants to be a lawyer,” Dom said. 

“Still a civil servant,” Barba pointed out. Carisi didn't have the heart for monied law. 

“Like you’re a civil servant?” Dom sipped from his glass, then gave his assessment with all the bite from the whiskey: “Fancy suit.”

Barba jumped on it. The response was bone-deep to defend his work and himself, nevermind the opponent. 

“Civil servant with a strong prosecutions record. I earn my bonuses.” 

Dom didn’t fire back; he idled, considered his drink, the weak morning light, the day. Barba remembered the settled air about the man’s shoulders when he first saw him from across the church parking lot, and realized he’d surely miscalculated. 

This wasn’t a man who made his insults covertly, if he made them at all. 

“Sonny talks about you a lot. Never said you couldn’t take a compliment.” 

“Oh,” Barba said, his stomach sinking in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. You didn’t seem inclined to give one.” 

“Said you were ornery.” 

“That's a compliment I'll take,” Barba joked, and wondered in the ensuing silence if he was making any headway, or simply being a bore. He considered all that Carisi had told him about his family, and implied, too, given their Italian roots and working class upbringing. His mind chased after the long-ago decisions of both their families, taking up where they did--or _could_ \--and establishing themselves. Barba could think dismissively of the Bronx all he wanted, but there was no denying the blocks of City street sprawl Cubans like himself had taken up in and secured for their own. 

Still lost in thought, Barba found himself speaking quietly and at length, “He respects you a great deal. All that you've done, immigrating here, making a home--a life--for him, providing for your family…” Thinking he’d embarrassed himself with too personal a compliment, Barba finished quickly, “Of course I agree. It's admirable.” 

Dom seemed unimpressed. “We all do it.”

Barba found himself smiling at that. The sentiment engendered a better world than the one Barba knew to exist, holding all immigrants and immigrant-families in equal regard, leveling them then to the matured status of citizenry, albeit still with that one caveat, that inkling of destiny rather than fate. Human beings chose their destinies, but accepted their fates. It was a simple but necessary distinction. 

Barba saw a troubled path towards what Carisi wanted for them both--it was hardly destiny, never fate--and decided he could start to clear it.

He plucked a framed photo from the collection and asked, “Your older brother?”

Of the two men in the photo, one was unmistakably Dominick Carisi, because he was the spitting image of his son: lanky and squinting, a mustache framing his upper lip. 

He looked nothing like the man at his side, who was dark in his features, broad throughout, and laid well with muscle. They could have been family friends for all Barba knew, but he was willing to play a hunch.

“Sonny tell you that?”

“Just a guess,” Barba said, setting the picture down. “I figured there was a reason he wasn’t Dominick III.”

Dom finished the rest of his whiskey and set the glass aside. He did not mean to drink, only to occupy himself and his company with something other than words. The effort made Barba think of a bar he often frequented with his wealthier friends from Harvard. Taking your friends to drink at The Crow--which was smoky and dark and crowded--meant total inebriation was the only means of satisfying oneself with their company. 

“Leonardo was my father’s name. Leo got it first.” After a beat, Dom added with the barest hint of satisfaction, “‘Course, he only had daughters.”

“He didn’t get a Leona?” Barba said, quirking a slight and tired smile. He felt as though he’d run miles to get to just this point: a shared insight, quiet but rife with good humor.

“He damn well tried.” 

Barba, expecting Sonny to be every bit his father’s son, was surprised when the older man did not then wander off into some vast and detailed tale of the man’s wife, her pregnancies, and heap all other unnecessary information on a mere acquaintance. 

Dom said only, “Sonny says you didn’t know your father very well.”

Barba read that as Carisi’s efforts to deflect any questions about the man, for Barba’s sake. 

“Sonny’s being kind on my behalf. I knew my father very well. I just didn’t like him.” 

He’d been compelled to testify to as much in court, so saying so now--even to Carisi’s father--was a simple task. His father was a cruel man, a bully. And if Barba didn’t often speak ill of the dead, it was only because they no longer had the faculties necessary to hear him.

Dom poured himself another two fingers of whiskey, and Barba accepted the same.

It felt like an interference to their discussion moreso than an aid. 

“You’re not a religious man.” 

Barba wondered if this was an observation from their morning at Mass, or if Dom took into account that whole _honour thy mother and father_ thing Barba went 50/50 on.

“No. Not for some time,” Barba answered simply, and as if to drive home his point, he spied a crucifix hanging on the wall of the study. It was nothing so large as to demand an immediate audience, but Barba was nonetheless perturbed at permitting it to go unnoticed for as long as he had. 

He felt compelled in this absence of observatory faith to check over his shoulder for looming nuns.

And when he realized all too late that Dom had been speaking to the worth and necessity of keeping the faith, Barba imagined the snap of a ruler against the back of his hand so keenly, he looked for the mark. 

“...manage our ideals. Teaches us goodness before greatness. Keeps us humble.”

“I have a mother who does that,” Barba said, quick enough to mask the fact that he had only been half-listening. “And a slew of county judges whose sole pleasure in life is keeping me humble.” 

Dom studied Barba as he mulled over his response. It was strange for Barba to realize that in all this time, he’d not once felt so scrutinized as he did now--not in their first meeting, even. 

Barba remembered that this was a man who’d raised a son who believed becoming a priest would solve the question of his sexuality by effectively annulling it. There was more to unpack there than piousness--namely, institutionalization. Barba realized this wasn’t amounting to a mere difference of opinion, but a break in ideology that the senior Carisi could not contend with.

There were issues enough with his only son taking up with another man. But a _lapsed Catholic?_

“They’ve got all types now. In the Church. Tolerated, and all that.”

“M-hm,” Barba said, and bit back a more caustic response. _Complete derision, but I get a seat in an uncomfortable pew? That’s your pitch? What a deal._

Or, perhaps if he’d loosened himself with another drink more, Barba might have given an honest answer: _I don’t need that. It’s just as well that I don’t want it._

Instead of making the unwinnable argument against tradition, Barba again let the room command his attention. Family reunions on muddy seasides and careful portraits in Sunday’s best were answer enough to any of Barba’s questions, so he went outside the room, outside the country, and there found friendliness in his voice, and a slow assurance to his inquiries now that he did not want them answered. He found olive groves and imaginings both rich in creation and impoverished for fact.

He found banality like someone else’s homeland, and took cover there for an afternoon.

“You were in Italy recently--how was that?”

-

The table was set with a selection of perfectly formed frittatas, bowls of cut fruit, pitchers of iced tea, and juices spilled like sunset orange over the frosted white of the glass. Seats were taken and grace was said before life again resumed its proper place. Barba had taken Carisi’s hand during the prayer--such was his excuse--and kept it still, as if in waiting under the table. 

Carisi was grateful for Barba’s apparent ease, though he did not know of the cause.

Kitty was sat at the head of the table, and was flanked by her daughters. Together they made the picture of a queen and her court, with everyone else resigned to a role in her humble audience. 

Tommy arrived late to the table with a surefire excuse about having to settle Beatrice. When he sat, he gently moved Bella’s long hair to rest over one shoulder, then put his arm along the back of her seat. He did both things without a second thought--first, so as not to catch and pinch her hair, and second, because nothing was more natural than closing any spaces that spread between them. Such was how their relationship had survived the trail against Tommy’s parole officer: they’d reached out to one another. Desperation was the driving force at first, but was fast overtaken with necessity, and ultimately--nature. 

They had one another’s pain, love, and child. 

And yet, tenderness seemed the last thing they should come by. 

The meal began quietly, which Barba supposed was a response to his presence. He briefly had the opportunity to excuse himself to answer a call from his office, and in the other room used the opportunity to text Carisi and confirm his suspicions. 

_[you all don’t normally eat like there’s been a death in the family and the corpse is kept under the table, right?]_

In returning to the meal, Barba had a different vantage point from which to observe the scene. 

He saw the artfully set table and beautiful company for a fantasy. Under that brief moment of grace, it was lovely and still, like a painting. This was the world Carisi occupied, mistaking its static pretenses for assurances. 

Barba blinked and saw the moment after, when tensions rose from the ground and danced like ugly marionettes. They rattled and leaped as though prompted by the shaking earth itself, until their movements found homes on the faces of those gathered, and there were still twisted, but became fixed.

These unsure expressions were obvious to Barba--perhaps because he’d known them longer, or always thought to look. As the meal carried on, Carisi continued to smile, blissfully unaware.

Barba’s proud anger was a well into which he meant to sink Carisi’s own dewy optimism. Entomb it, even, lest it arrive again to bring Barba the reminder that he could still feel shame, and still wound himself by its sting. 

Barba covered Carisi’s hand where it still rested on the table, and gave it a squeeze. The gesture was hardly anything, except for the scrutiny they were under, which magnified its significance while obliterating all aligned purpose. 

Why _should_ another man feel cause to comfort their son, their brother? 

How was it at all possible that they had failed one of their own?

Was it not likelier that this stranger meant to infiltrate their lives, assume an identity that wasn’t his for the taking, and offer tired, sweet smiles when questioned? 

Theresa thought so.

“So, you were almost assassinated. What was that like?”

“Theresa,” Carisi balked. “What the hell?”

“Language,” Kitty chastised. 

Barba didn’t miss a beat. 

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said.

There was a murmur of surprised chuckles around the room, all falling flat compared to Bella’s surprisingly guttural “Ha!” 

Tommy chimed in, “This was on account of a court case, right?”

Barba did not mind questioning from Tommy; he had knowledge enough in such intimate dealings, but Barba’s job in the abstract was still alien to him. What did Barba’s work mean for _Barba,_ when for those on whose accounts he advocated, it meant the world? 

“Yes,” Barba said, and was proud of how easily the truth of the matter found him. Though months of therapy could not account for his ability to identify plain and simple truths, they smoothed Barba’s way towards admitting them. 

The ordeal was an insult to his person, but Barba knew better now than to assume the fault for its pain rested with him.

“It was… retribution, of a kind.”

“You say that like it was the mob,” Theresa countered. “It was _cops.”_

“Cops who sought to enact mob justice,” Barba reasoned aloud. “So, really, that’s my point made.” Fork in hand, he turned to Kitty and told her kindly, “This is delicious, by the way. My abuela used to make something similar--with pork and plantains.”

Kitty pursed her lips and did not take her eyes off her own plate. 

“It’s potato and mushroom,” she said. 

Theresa cut in, “Your what?”

Beside him, Barba felt Carisi sigh in derision at his sister’s antics. 

“My abuela,” Barba answered, unblinking. “You can Google that, too.”

After a beat of deathly quiet, the Carisi clan proved that Carisi himself was well and truly a product of his upbringing: none were so smarted by a reprimand that they did not immediately try again, and as such, the silence did not last long. 

“I read in the _Post_ that--”

“Gina, not you too!” Carisi lamented. “And the _Post,_ really?”

“You can ask your brother,” Barba said, heading off any and all further questions. “He was there.”

To those gathered, the answer came as a surprising revelation, spurred by imagined upset, but from Barba’s end, it was a calculated piece of manipulation. It was just sorry enough that, if the Carisis were capable of feelings beyond confusion, they might feel _sympathy_ for him. That soft feeling was deceptively strong, and for its worth, it would indelibly tie situation and consequence to Barba’s continued presence in Carisi’s life. The sharing of the ordeal--as surely as the events themselves--would then marry both men in a kind of trial by fire. 

Respectively, theirs were stories of survival and rescue. And neither telling was complete or made sense or roused intrigue without the other.

Better still than good narrative work, the statement was more about Carisi than Barba himself, and Barba couldn’t have wished for a better audience for it. 

Here was Carisi, son and brother alike, the hero they all knew and loved. 

Was it so absurd, then, that the knowing and loving of this young man should be practiced by others? 

It was confirmation, too, of their own private lore, or whatever Sonny had dubbed it. Barba could only just imagine it: _How did you two meet?_

_Well…_

But the idea was cut short of its making. Theresa swatted it out of the air herself, the gesture rooted in a shrug, as if it was as inconsequential as a gnat.

“Sonny doesn’t talk about it.”

The glass in Barba’s hand stalled as he raised it to drink. He didn’t think Carisi had hang-ups about what Barba had endured. But then, Barba didn’t peg Carisi for having much in the way of boundaries, either, so he counted the surprising few as a lump sum. 

This, the priest, the labored pursuit of his mother’s acceptance--they were adding up.

“Where is it you’re from?”

By Kitty’s tone, Barba knew she had summoned up a line of questioning. Barba was ready. 

“The Bronx, born and raised.” Barba smiled as if to hint that they were practically neighbors, each as far north or south as the rest of the City, and in that moshed geography was a kind of likeness. “My mother runs a charter school there. Berman Academy.” 

“How prestigious. Did you attend, also?” 

“No, I went to Catholic School.” 

“And NYU,” Carisi added. “And Harvard.”

“St. John’s and Fordham is nothing to sneeze at, you know.” 

“No, of course not,” Barba said with some surprise, as he realized the comment was meant for _him._

“Ma--”

“Is he why you ran yourself ragged with school and work?”

Carisi stumbled in his attempt to dismiss the claim as unfounded. _She wasn’t entirely wrong._ Carisi wanted his law degree, but what really showed was his desire to engage with Barba, to speak to him on his level, and to be seen as his contemporary. 

“No, ma, that’s--a separate passion. I have--many passions.” 

_“Language.”_

“Ma, come on.” Carisi raised one hand to his mother, palm open, inviting, and set the other one on Barba’s shoulder, as if to bridge the cavernous space between the two. As if they were ideas, only, and not vastly different people. “I wouldn’t have passed the bar without Barba’s help.” 

“Did he tell you that?” 

Barba frowned. “Excuse me?” 

“Ma,” Carisi repeated, his tone as short and stern as Barba had ever heard it. 

Kitty feigned indifference. She asked, as if confused, “Barba?” 

Carisi blushed. “Raf. Rafael. It’s outta habit, now, you know?” 

“That’s right, you work together.” 

It was a dig made with something sharpened and new, and nothing like the familiar, dull point of a spade. It was distress folded into something innate in her character, her protector spirit. All she had here in her home, on her island, she’d salvaged from thin times and family strife and moments of doubt. And if her son could only know how hard it was to maintain, he would not flaunt his desertion of its standards. 

The others did not-- _could not_ \--know as well as she, who had been all things to all people--mother, wife, and sister. Whose whole life had gone into the production of her family. 

She alone saw this new and untold threat to her son, and it was her duty to chastise him for abandoning the safety of tradition and familiarity to go explore it.

“Kind of like how you met Dad,” Carisi tried in vain to place their choices side by side. “Being a switchboard operator for the City.” 

She could hardly bear it.

He’d always been _so good._

“What are you doing,” she said, her voice quietly ruined. It wasn’t a question.

The next words out of Carisi’s mouth were an unmitigated _plea,_ and it made Barba sick to his stomach to hear them. 

“Ma, I’ve told you--” 

_“I never asked.”_

There was immediate crosstalk. Bella voiced an appeal similar to her brother’s. The older sisters talked amongst themselves and whispered crude explanations to their oblivious aunt. Dom looked upon the discord between his wife and son and did not see a path through it. 

Barba found himself watching the scene as it played out before him, an orchestrated drama complete with stage direction and choreography. Strangely, Barba consumed it all as if it had nothing to do with him. As if he were so lucky to entertain familial discord as a lark. 

He remedied the situation, spidering one hand from his lap to find Carisi’s elbow. He hooked a hold there, and the effect was almost courtly: as if Carisi was leading him, and Barba was willing to follow.

“Raf. Could you give us a minute?”  
It was not the response Barba had expected. His slipping grip attested to that much. He already felt like a civilian cursing tyrants with a whisper--now he had to cede to their rule in open court.

“Certainly.”

He stood and left the table. If he never returned to it again, he wouldn’t be surprised.

Even taking just the few steps out of the dining room and through the corridor, Barba’s mind was a storm of contradictions: Was this the meeting Carisi would have for them all, for better or worse? Was it not simply a wrong to be righted? If not, why would Carisi send him away, when Barba’s position turned by circumstance from guest to reinforcements?

Or didn’t Carisi understand it wasn’t merely Barba being disrespected that made for a poor showing, but Carisi, being dismissed? 

Barba made his way into the restroom where he washed his hands and stared at himself in the mirror. Supposing he could see what so unnerved Carisi’s mother about his sole look and presence, well--Barba knew eye cream wasn’t cutting it.

His outfit--while chosen so carefully--now had the air of luxury and corruption. The material for the shirt was so fine, Barba could see the white of his undershirt at the arms, and because he’d again had his vest taken in, the cut was smooth and fine down his middle, and snug along the curve of his back. 

Ostensibly, Barba cut a handsome figure. He’d certainly caught Carisi staring that morning, but having those same blue eyes pitted in the faces of others find him time and time again left him feeling bereft of a good look. He felt as though he’d go to pieces under the severity of those cutting glances. 

“Why did I wear purple,” he muttered under his breath. “It makes my face even pinker and _I look like a ham._ ”

After deciding the home wasn’t so big that he couldn’t be found when his presence was--at last--desired, Barba ventured back into the nestled space of the study, though with a second look he found the place more solitary than cozy. The books climbed the walls in precarious stacks--nothing like the pin-neatness of the rest of the home. Where before it had been charming, Barba saw the room now for a deathtrap. 

He traced his fingers along the edges of a desk, and hit upon the glasses of whiskey he'd shared with Dominick Sr. 

Much like the progress Barba had believed he'd made here, they were drained and misplaced. 

He searched through the photos of Carisi’s family again. A few choice polaroids were tucked into comically small frames, and the washes of yellow and pink light throughout the images were a result of the chemical designs of their production, and not any especially nostalgic features of the coast in 1980s-Staten Island. 

It was all very curious, because they _seemed_ happy and loving.

To his surprise, Barba decided he very much liked the room, otherwise. It was cramped and overstuffed, but the stacked piles of books and stagnant, smiling faces made it easy for Barba to understand why Carisi liked coming home. 

He could imagine him here--young, lanky, brash and loud to mask the quiet contemplation he preferred. Barba could see him getting lost in this little place, filling his mind with the complete thoughts of others, and not turning to his own and feeling sickened for them.

Barba banked those thoughts, tied them up in resignation and dismissed them. Surely, Carisi had done the same. Maybe lobbed them far over his shoulder, never looking back to see that they had mounted themselves again and were coming for him, hot on his heels.

Thoughts, however, were the least of it. 

Sometimes those sentiments came hand-delivered, and parted the lips of a loved one or confidant, forever souring the instinct to trust them. 

It was just as well that Theresa found _Barba_ rather than a loved one. 

She strode easily into the study, and made her way to the cabinet where her father kept his whiskey. She poured herself a tiny helping, moreso to make a claim of familiarity than encourage her to speak her mind. She never lacked for that.

“You seem like a smart guy. Did you really think this would be okay?”

Barba smiled--not unkindly, but with all due bemusement as her announcement deserved. He slipped his hands into his pockets and discovered that he really did feel as at ease as he looked in that moment. People picked fights with him--that’s what he knew. That’s where he thrived.

“I suppose I got the wrong impression from a biased source.” 

With her height and angular features, Theresa had an invincibility about her. There were turns of delicacy in the soft shine of her hair and the curve of her lips, but those were artificial manifestations of the thing. Barba saw immediately that this woman would never be confused for _soft,_ not even in the few ways Carisi applied those terms to Barba. 

Soft-hearted, for one. 

She cut to the chase: “Sonny’s always had crushes on the older boys. On teachers. All of _them_ knew better than to take him seriously.” 

“How old do you all think I am?” Barba asked, cocking his head slightly so as to appear sweeter than he was by half. 

The line came fast and well, but Theresa’s comment lodged into Barba’s gut like shrapnel. It would keep for now, but he knew he’d have to excavate it soon, and then fumble alone so as to staunch the bleeding.

A furrowed brow joined the look as Barba added coolly, “And how is it you’re telling me this, and I’m still meant to believe his coming out was a shock?”

Theresa folded her arms across her chest and said, “Lots of little boys have crushes on older men.” 

“Yes. They’re little gay boys.” 

Theresa narrowed her gaze into the slightest sliver of steel. 

“I don’t think I like you,” she said, and frowned deeper when Barba delivered unto her a bright, carefree smile.

“Oh, I gathered that.” 

-

Brunch was unquestionably _over._ Barba heard Beatrice stir into wakefulness with a few uneasy cries, and then satisfied suckling. The television was turned on low and boasted a slow second quarter of a football game. Conversations struck themselves like matches, and as he abandoned the relatively safety of the study, Barba was burned by a few.

It took him another twenty minutes before he caught Carisi alone again. This, only after the younger man had exhausted himself in clipped discussions with his mother over the dishes. His hands were still pruned and wet when they next found Barba’s.

Barba wanted to leave and he harbored no doubts that--at least among a majority of Carisis--the feeling was mutual. 

“You told your aunt I’m bisexual.” 

“Um. I told her lots of things about you. Why?” 

“Because she just tried to sell me on your sister Gina, _that’s why._ And I, thinking it was a joke--or a _trap_ \--overplayed my hand, and she got all _huffy_ with some line like--‘Oh, so you’re a gay now? My nephew’s a gay now. Funny how that is.’” Barba mimicked her throaty tone--she spoke like she was breathing through an air vent--but held off from miming her pinched expression. “ _And_ I think she’s trying to curse me.” 

“What, no. That’s just how she looks after the stroke.” 

Barba heaved a sigh and threw his head back into the effort for good measure. 

“You could have just told her I’m gay,” he said, and seemed to have saved the revelation of his defeat for Carisi alone.

“But you’re not.” 

“Is that of any consequence to your _aunt?_ No. It would have been easier if you’d said I was like you.” 

Carisi shifted uncomfortably. They were stood just beyond the kitchen and ahead of a small section of windows. Pale white light spilled in, but did little to brighten their spirits. The mug of coffee Carisi had pressed into Barba’s hand more than made up for it.

“Okay, well, at GOAL--” 

“Oh my god, _enough_ with the gay Justice League.” 

There was a beat of silence into which Barba deposited his good sense and Carisi left his nerve, and for a time neither man spoke. Barba sipped his coffee, then cleared his throat. 

“Look--”

“You’re not the first person to make that joke to my face, you know,” Carisi started in, and if Barba felt guilty of anything, it was adding another cruel voice where Carisi hadn’t heard one, previous. It was as though people were coming out of the woodwork, now, following up years of kindness with one crushing word to the contrary.

Next thing he knew, Carisi would see his second grade teacher in the grocery store, and she’d hassle him, too. 

“...But you were kind of the least expected.”

Barba rolled his eyes. He’d awoken early on a Sunday and spent the morning in a Staten Island Catholic church; sensitivity was a little beyond him at the moment. 

“Look--I’m sorry. I’m sorry for that one, inconsequential thing I just said. It’s not like either of us walked the other into the lion’s den at feeding time-- _oh wait._ ”

Carisi looked down and away. He couldn’t make eye contact with Barba when lying--at least, not since Barba developed an eye for it. 

“It’s not that bad,” he hedged. 

“No? Is that why you came out in your _thirties?_ Because of how not-bad it is?”

There was silence again, but it glaringly extended out through the kitchen and into the living room. Barba winced and Carisi closed his eyes; they both knew they’d been overheard.

“I’m going home,” Barba said, demonstrably quieter this time.

Carisi didn’t bother to make the effort, there.

“Okay, yeah, we can go--” 

“That was not an invitation. Trust me, you don’t want to be there right now.”

“You didn’t do yourself any favors. Texting me? Come on!” 

“I was subtle.” 

“We were sat by each other, answering texts that were offset by, like, twenty seconds.” 

“Whatever. I’ll send you another when I get home.”

Carisi’s hand found Barba’s at the man’s side. He gave a sweet, crooked smile and ducked his head some so that Barba couldn’t help but see it. 

“Come on…” 

“Don’t try me.” 

Carisi dropped the doe-eyed routine and asked, “You’re _seriously_ going to make me take the ferry back?”

A little fight was infinitely preferable to the tame figure Carisi posed before his family, and to reward the turn, Barba ceded the matter. 

“Fine. You’re driving.”

Carisi huffed a laugh, then surprised Barba with a kiss on his cheek. Carisi lingered there, pressed against Barba’s side, liking that the man smelled like coffee and home and--whiskey, was it? 

Carisi shuffled on his feet until he stood just ahead of Barba, then pitched himself forward and dropped his head childishly against the man’s shoulder. Barba warded off a smile with another sip of coffee and a look of nonchalance. 

“Was _anything_ good?”

Carisi sounded so miserable in his hopefulness that Barba had to answer him well, or else risk sinking Carisi’s spirits as low as his own. 

“Of course,” he tutted, drawing confidence from a place well beyond the reaches of Staten Island. “Your mother is a wonderful cook.”

-

Carisi encored his conciliatory nature for his parents and family. Everyone got a hug and a kiss and a promise to see them again soon. And for as distinctly as Barba felt as though he’d arrived with one companion and was leaving with another, he took care to deliver a similar defeat unto himself while attending to the motions of goodbyes. 

Barba couldn’t fully grasp the words _“It was a pleasure,”_ because it was hardly that for any of them. With the words he settled on, Barba knew he was admitting defeat outright. He supposed it was well enough that they all knew they were agreed--there was no winning this contest.

He tugged them on, same as his coat. They’d see him through inclement weather and shredded expectations alike. The words themselves were primed and polished, much like his movements in the church. 

Affectations, all. 

_“Thank you for meeting me.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My reasoning for characterizing the Carisi family like I did is two-pronged: one, we know from the show that Carisi’s parents think trans kids “do it for attention,” which leads me to believe they have fairly limited views on most things outside their own accepted norms. Secondly, we all know these kind of people. People who raised us or our friends and who have every capacity to be loving and kind, except when met with their own prejudices. I’d like to avoid stereotypes as best I can, but I don’t believe that behavior to be sympathetic. Lmao anyway we’ll see how it goes~


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys are amazing. :') Thank you all so much for your kind words--not just about the story, but about this silly little community here and the relief and escapism it brings. Necessary reminders, all.

The snow falling in New York was sympathy card blue, dusty in the waning light, though it was closer to morning than not. 

It didn’t glitter in those few, quiet places it found to pile in; grey skies pulled right over the sun, masking it from view and making it of little use to their day. 

Carisi glanced at his phone as they sat stalled in traffic. He waited for Barba to start in on one dismissive rant or another--either people couldn’t drive in snow, or they drove like maniacs. He opted for a different angle depending on the block they were on--Manhattan didn’t move, regardless, but _Heaven help_ those fools on the turnpike--but here, inching along, Barba said nothing.

“There’s an exit not too far ahead, if you want another coffee?”

“And have to merge into this again?” Barba said--a dismissal, if only in tone.

To Carisi’s ears, they both sounded tired, as if worn out from an argument they hadn’t yet spilled themselves into and exhausted all their faculties for. He wondered if Barba was going through the motions already, taking the time to craft the most damning of lines and winning turns.

Except--usually, Barba couldn’t even keep a first draft to himself. Not when something took in his whole heart.

Carisi worried after that, too. Barba’s apparent dispassion for Carisi’s church and family posed its own problems concerning compatibility of holidays, let alone a life. He saw a quick end to those concerns, of course--Barba would execute it like a guillotine, dismissing any lukewarm invitation, opting instead not to compromise, but to divert. He’d have the quiet dinner he always had with his mother, or sink hours into his work while the rest of the City played. 

It seemed a sad and unnecessary turn. Why settle when there was more to tackle? More laughter and food, more company, more love?

Carisi realized, of course, that he hadn’t delivered on his preview of all that. Every promised feature held to the cutting room floor, and Carisi had in its place three hours of tedious B-roll. All the same, he couldn’t summon up his apology--not just yet. He didn’t wholly accept that the morning had gone as poorly as it had and--perhaps if he stalled--the memory would brighten, like memories did, when the harsh glare of reality fell on something else, and the light refracted into a rainbow of misdirection. 

Maybe their recollections would brighten by comparison if they never got out of traffic. 

_That brunch was abysmal, but at least we weren’t staring down a burn orange sedan with truck nuts._

“The Lieu still wants you to take the Meryl Corben case.” 

“Oh, did you suddenly find evidence of a crime?” Barba asked, though he could scarcely believe they were having any conversation besides the one that surely followed them out the door--the one that threw tired answers after long questions, strengthened in silences, and ended in sighs.

But if it was a different conversation Carisi wanted, Barba could spin _that_ into a fight, too. _Easy._

“If Liv thinks she can send _you_ to _me_ with the same measly case and get a different response, she is sorely mistaken.”

“She didn’t _send_ me. M’just trying to make conversation.” Carisi frowned, realizing that was the honest truth. Gruesome crimes fit themselves more prominently into their daily conversations than much else, and were often Carisi’s first means of breaching a silence when Barba refused to meet him for so much as a shared glance, let alone a word. 

These matters--tragic as they were--demanded a response.

“Why don’t you believe her?”

“Believe who--Ms. Corben?”

“Yeah.”

Barba sat up a little straighter.

“I… believe that something awful happened to her. But I know I can’t take a gut feeling to court and win.” 

“Well,” Carisi huffed, unsatisfied with what met his ears as concise and practical, when the situation it answered for was neither of those things. _“Try.”_

“Try, and if I lose? I’ve only spoken to her once and she about crumbled to the floor at the mere _prospect_ of a trial. What do you think a room full of people agreeing she’s a liar or worse is going to do to her?” Barba pursed his lips after his tear. He’d never been able to successfully ice out a conversation, and Carisi knew that. Barba decided if he couldn’t corral his own tongue, he’d make Carisi regret asking for it. 

“I can’t believe we still need to have this conversation,” he said, his tone drawing to a sharp point. “It’s almost every other week with all of you. The cognitive dissonance is _astounding._ Sometimes justice isn’t possible. My job has limits. Your’s has options. Consider her sanity and well-being, and help her get counselling.” 

Carisi opened his hands where they held the wheel. He ached to make a more aggressive argument, and wild gestures fulfilled that mandate when words could not.

“Her story is consistent, though.”

“The story about how she destroyed evidence because she was so distraught?” Barba raised an eyebrow. “Yes, the lack of evidence holds all that together nicely.”

“Raf…” Barba rolled his eyes, already thinking what an _effort_ Carisi was about to make, what passionate _plea_ was going to gush forth and drown his heart. 

No, Barba wanted to tell him at once. His heart was on higher ground. And there were levees, besides.

But Carisi mounted his assault all the same.

“You know she was homeschooled? And a virgin? And she bought into that whole abstinence-only, ‘sex makes you like a chewed piece of gum’ bullshit?” 

Then, because Barba chose not to be moved by facts that made no different ends, only sadder beginnings, Carisi went full-seminar on him, gathering every term in his arsenal and making a crater of the playing field. 

“Those are her circumstances. They are _that_ restrictive. And reductive. So, you know, maybe loosen yours. Have some empathy, here, and risk your winning streak for something that matters.”

Barba took in a low breath, as if to pace himself for the marathon to come. That was Carisi’s only mistake: he bled Barba into the conversation. Now, Barba had cause to defend himself.

“ _Risk?_ There isn’t a bookie alive who would take the odds on this one,” Barba said snippily. “And you know as well as I do that I’m winning these cases because only _complete idiots_ don’t take a plumb deal when they’re offered one. _That,_ and the particularly strong work of SVU as of late. So, if you find some miracle evidence--or a confession, oh, I love those--I will take the case. Until then, you can--” 

He’d built up to deadly point, but Carisi got out ahead of him, passing fast and cutting off his path.

“I wasn’t fishing for compliments,” Carisi said. Barba was--in general--a fairly shallow pool for that. He surrendered kindness in bed, a thing which Carisi found deeply pleasing and strangely erotic. It almost left him uneasy, hearing a generous word spoken in the light of day. “I just want to know that you understand where Meryl is coming from.” 

“Teachings to diminish the rights and standing of women? You realize that I _just_ came from a Roman Catholic Church service, right?” 

Carisi tightened his grip firmly on the wheel. “Okay. I get it. You’re in a mood.”

“I blaspheme with a clear mind,” Barba shot back, though his arms crossed over his chest and expression sliding just left of a pout did little to deny Carisi's claim.

Time dragged in the car--as one might expect it to, along that spatial and ideological gulp between Staten Island and Manhattan. The clogged toll lanes gave Carisi an opportunity to check his phone. He sighed, reading the messages. They did not surprise him, or even upset him, really. Carisi pondered uselessly there, circling the thought at great distance, like there was something to be said for seeing the whole of it.

“My sister said you were rude to her.” 

“Which one?” Barba asked, much too smart to deny the charge outright.

“Theresa.” 

“Then yes. But not without provocation.” 

Carisi knew that much wasn't a false claim; Theresa could spot the line from a mile away, but would take two giant steps only to cross it. 

“Still. That wasn’t nice.”

“I’m sorry, when did I ever present myself as _nice?_ ” 

“Hey, no. You are nice.” Carisi moved his hand to Barba’s leg and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “And conniving, ‘cause I know that’s just you trying to let yourself off the hook.” 

Traffic came to a lull and Carisi read another text. This one, he did not meet with understanding.

“You called me a _little gay baby?”_

There was a second’s time for which Barba could mount no defense. 

“She’s misconstruing the entire conversation,” Barba started in, though he could not wholly deny the premise. Further, he did not wish to recount the particulars; it seemed the more mature thing to let it die. 

But the aghast expression on Carisi’s face did not lend itself to that end, so Barba found himself awkwardly explaining what he had seen as something of a victory of rhetoric and cool. 

_If you could have just seen the way I said it, though…_

_“Basically,_ she said you’ve always had crushes on older men, who have dutifully ignored them. I’m the idiot for mistaking your advances as something genuine.” 

“You know that’s total bullshit,” Carisi said in a huff. Then, eyebrows quirked, he amended, “Well--I dunno. Maybe I do have a type.”

“Uh-huh,” Barba said, not finding his imagined company quite so amusing. “But by all means, have this conversation about attitude with only me.” 

Barba said this and did not look at Carisi to see the sentiment land, and decimate any of the poor boy’s lingering hopes for a quiet car ride home. And Barba didn’t need to look: he had the whole of Carisi memorized from the moment they left his parents’ home. His vest, slipped-on but still undone, lost under his slack jacket and coat. It was much the same all over: scarf fisted in a hurry, rather than laid on with the careful plaint he’d started with that morning; gloves, absent any hands, were pocketed; hands swept back his hair after the warmth of his home did its level best to muss it. 

Everything was loose and harried, with the exception of Carisi’s expression: pinched and held high, with a promised parting-smile for his family that set too close under his nose. Nothing was as it should have been--at least this much, everyone was agreed.

“My family is really important to me. I have to make this work for them.” 

Carisi recited these words. They were a living, breathing mantra Barba had not before been party to, yet Carisi spoke them with the same flow and conviction of a daily prayer.

“You’re going to end up compromising yourself,” Barba said. It was a simple declaration--nothing he had to buttress with heady words or seasoned arguments. He simply knew how these things went. “Compromising me.”

“No, hey, _listen_ \--I can do both. I just need to work harder at it, and they’ll get there.” 

“Best of luck to you.”

“I mean it--they’ll get there. Like,” Carisi did not have to search for an example, but the one that came rushing ahead of the pack was less the obvious-favorite, and more the cause with a head start--always--in Carisi’s heart. 

“What if we have kids?”

Barba laughed--a cold, sharp bark of a thing. 

“Oh, sure, the _nuclear option._ A living, breathing, crying bargaining chip.” Another joyless bark of laughter ushered forth as Barba revisited the idea in his mind. “No, thank you.”

“Oh,” Carisi said, his response lacking both the desperation of his first word hurled at the idea’s base, and any mimicry of Barba’s own bombastic tones into which he sounded his disapproval. The word was there, whether he moved his lips or blew air from his lungs into it or not.

The moments thereafter seized upon that fact, and wrought aggravated silence for miles. It was as if time and space itself recognized the impropriety of being mocked when a plea was made as a genuine suggestion. Carisi wondered where that cosmic support had been no too long ago--or if the place he called home was under a rolling blackout, and he’d been excluded from service there.

“I can't make it happen,” Barba said, and for one absurd moment Carisi forgot they were talking--first and foremost--about friendly relations. 

Barba continued, “I can't make them like or accept me. That's not on me.” He made a pointed addition, and hoped this was the last he had to speak on the matter: “I'm sure they've said as much at GOAL.” 

A different kind of quiet spread. It was a less a waiting game, but no more a choice. Instead, it was shame, and the selfish benefit of not opening one’s mouth to it, lest it pass through lips and make itself known to loved ones and strangers alike. Lest it become _spectacle._

Barba had new knowledge of this game, while Carisi’s practice was tried and true. 

For his part, Barba thought they’d reached their end. No more discussions or arguments, no more gentle pleas hidden between bedsheets or passed like coffee cups over breakfast. 

“When you told me to take off my vest--why did you even think about that?”

Barba closed his eyes, and left the first touches of a migraine press into the forefront of his mind. It was a fist drawing in, then knuckles leading fingers to claw at the far reaches of his brain. Barba kept his chin above the sinking ache, reminding himself that he’d withstood worse than imagined hands at his temple.

“Not thinking about things like that doesn’t excuse me _or you_ from their consequences.” 

“Sounds exhausting,” Carisi remarked.

“We all do it,” Barba said, and opened his eyes again to serve Carisi a curious look. “Hell, you’ve been doing it. All your life, under a different flag. You composed yourself into straightness.” 

Turning slightly to face forward, Barba spoke idly, the thoughts rising to the top of his head as pain squeezed from below. 

“Because I know their game and curb the view before they see the playing field, suddenly I’m the traitor? Though, it hardly matters. I cut one argument off at the knee. That didn’t stop your sister from making up another.” If it wasn’t their dress, it was Barba’s age, or Barba’s position, or Carisi’s history. There would always be one more thing to dredge up and await explanation, as if it was deserved. 

Barba sighed. “I’m just--”

“Tired,” Carisi supplied in slow, dawning realization. 

Barba’s smile was the too-sweet kind he exhibited when at a total loss. He loved this man. There were moments when he finally understood why. 

“You said so yourself. It is exhausting.”

“...You didn’t do it for yourself.”

It was so still and sorry a thought, Barba looked at Carisi and could not help himself for thinking, _I could have him forever._

Because Barba had Carisi baited on shame, even now. 

Feeling sick for it, Barba jumped on the chance to excuse Carisi’s mixed emotions. 

“I don’t need them to like me.” Barba said. He ushered those words from a great, gaping emptiness inside him. Not a hole, not a pierced section of heart--just space, rolling and wide, like hills. “Do you understand? I don’t _need_ that.” 

Still wrestling with his own revelation, Carisi pressed, “But I want them to--”

“Don’t make it your problem, Sonny. Because it’s certainly not mine. I don’t do that anymore.” 

If he could not give salvation, Barba decided a fair warning was the next best thing.

“I’m no sacrificial lamb. If you throw me into another situation like that, I’ll go in swinging. I won’t be spoken to that way. And I know if it were anybody else, you would back me up on that.”

By the end of Barba’s statement, Carisi was red-faced and glassy-eyed. More to the point: he was embarrassed. Hurt. _Ashamed._ All the things that Barba hated being made to feel, he’d unloaded them onto Carisi. Instead of recognizing his error, the fault compounded Barba’s own lowered--then met--expectations, and left him feeling bitterly satisfied.

His suspicions had proven right. He should be so proud. 

Uselessly--because here the thing had already happened and gone, and what did conjectures matter at such a point?--Carisi said, “I really thought it would go better than that.”

For once, Barba didn’t have it in him to bear his words down against a whetstone, to sharpen their edge. He spoke them whole and they came away soft. 

“Did you? _Really?_ ” 

Carisi’s miserable silence answered for itself. 

“I guess now we both know better.”

Barba made the sentiment sound somehow conversational, and his cool words hid any lasting offense. 

That was the day’s best takeaway: if nothing else, it was a learning experience.

The worst of it, Barba supposed after he’d taken stock of the morning, was Carisi’s mother. The way she looked around him as if she could avoid his presence was hardly subtle. Her coolness set in like deadly frostbite until Barba felt numb and cut off from the situation, though his body carried on, nodding and smiling and catering only to her. By the time Barba was excused from the table, rigor mortis had set in, the death rattle of a man trying to make a good impression. Barba had been trotted in for a ready dismissal, but then withstood the torturous process for hours. 

All the things she did not say aloud, Barba heard. And worse--

 _Worse,_ he thought, than biting his tongue was the realization that he was simply not going to argue with this woman. That was for Carisi to do, if he so chose. 

The way this went, Barba knew, was that he’d simply never see her again. 

Because where did he go from there? From debasements disguised as questions to despairing looks at her own son? Nowhere. And Carisi was stood at that dead end with them. 

_He can’t not know,_ Barba thought to himself, and the reality settled heavily over his heart and lungs, trapping air and feeling both so that he released neither. _He can’t feign ignorance. Not now, not again._

Barba did not look at Carisi again until they’d disappeared into the underground car park, and Carisi, feeling the return of an audience, sighed and gave an encore.

“Again, Raf--I’m really, really sorry.”

Barba brushed it off. A mere, “It’s _fine,”_ curtly delivered as he closed the passenger side door, shutting away the whole morning. 

-

In hindsight, Barba supposed the Carisi clan was not outright malicious, just uninformed and reactionary. They felt the way they felt, and Barba could read their efforts to correct it--certain language Carisi had shoehorned into their vocabulary, for one. But the resistance was there. The unease and displeasure and _animosity_ were there. 

Barba felt them each like a hot poker searing into his flesh. He could lean away, but eventually the space in which he could maneuver became minimal, and sinking back into it felt like his own abysmal choice. 

Worse, Barba knew the responses were tailored to _him._ Carisi’s parents were begrudgingly coming to accept that their only son was gay, but then they met precisely what that _meant:_ all broad shoulders and bright eyes and greying hair. 

They met this _man,_ who was too charming by half, _and older by the same measure,_ and they were wary.

Barba wondered--given his last year and all the threats, danger, and accompanying anxieties--if he did not give them cause to be.

Barba pushed those notions aside in his mind. Generally, he liked the perception he gave of himself to others. It was fine-tuned, sharp, and beautiful. 

If some did not appreciate it, well--there was no accounting for taste. 

Though…

Barba found himself hedging his bets. Maybe they wouldn't have adored a fair and bright young thing, not much different from Carisi himself, but Barba couldn't help but think that imaginary figure stood a better chance than he.

The bounds of his petulance stretched some as Barba entered his apartment pretending as though he was not fully aware that Carisi had joined him. Barba strode purposefully towards his bedroom while loosening his tie and unbuttoning his shirt. 

It wasn’t his intention, but he could not stop himself there. 

Barba shed his outfit entirely, stripping layer after layer until a chill met his skin, offset only by the satisfaction of distancing himself from another shared element of his morning. He had to marvel at the bizarre set of circumstances that left him wanting of a body besieged by its own nudity. 

Assured in its cut and shape, Barba felt familiar to himself entirely. With or without all the trappings, he was a known entity. 

Over his broad shoulders, Barba drew on a soft grey shirt and jeans that were more stylish than comfortable, though he admittedly did not keep pairs that passed that threshold. He hung his suit and tie, then deposited his lavender shirt in the hamper, all the while refusing to acknowledge the sweat stains holding like squashed fruit under the arms.

(Barba pushed the sleeves of his present shirt up to his elbows, however; a subconscious nod to imagined warmth.)

He brought an armful of files and paperwork to his cleared dining table, loading it heavy with purpose. The rest of the day was his, and this much was not up for discussion.

“I have work to do,” he said, though the explanation was needless. He abandoned his usual teasing tone, the one that accounted for the fact that Carisi had most weekends to himself, and Barba hadn’t known such a sweet setup since middle school. 

Carisi was well ahead of him, anyway--having sussed out the missing piece of Barba’s puzzle and fetched it: the phone forgotten in Barba’s winter coat. He brought that--and a glass of scotch--to the table. 

Carisi didn’t join him.

This much was his wont, a preference to hunker down beside Barba, to get an eyeful of the man’s work, and interfere with his own suggestions and commentary. He was still standing, too, as if on ceremony. Consciously or not, he was waiting for Barba to agree to his company. 

“What do you want to do for dinner, later?” Barba asked, eyes already scanning a ten-page deposition. 

“Um. About that…”

Barba supposed he should not have been moved by the answer; his morning had already been a wealth of disappointments.

Carisi gave a hemmed and mumbled explanation as to why he couldn’t have dinner later. He had errands to run, or plans with Rollins, or something equally as noncommittal. Barba buried his surprise in his paperwork, and more importantly--he did not press the issue. 

This was Carisi giving him an out, Barba reasoned, and affording them both some time to themselves. He looked up from his work and saw that Carisi hadn’t even shed his coat, and that he’d been standing fully dressed--save for his snow-dusted shoes--in Barba’s kitchen while Barba strutted around in silence, making him wait for so much as a second glance. 

“Of course,” Barba said, and by sheer willpower that had overtaken practice, not so much as a whiff of his embarrassment thread itself into his voice. 

Carisi nodded and turned on his heel--a militaristic shift of the dismissed. There wasn’t another word shared, much less a parting embrace. A kiss was out of the question. Barba was left in the silence he’d just as well set for himself, which he spent in quiet contemplation.

Scotch untouched, papers unread, and dread hollowing out a pit in the bottom of his stomach, Barba wondered less now why they were together, but rather--what would finally draw them apart?

He smirked humorlessly at himself, collected his scotch, and surrendered his mind to the whole ugly thought. 

He had scores of options, but selected his top tier: Carisi’s blind adoration of his family. The uncompromising stance Barba had taken for himself. The fact that both parties had Carisi’s ear, but neither whispered idea felt compatible with the other. They were--in effect--stirring a storm in the young man, and waiting for the inevitable fallout. 

Carisi obviously loved to learn from and emulate Barba, but it was his family’s values he embodied, his life growing long under the shadows of theirs.

It wouldn’t do to jut out at such a strange angle. 

Barba drained his scotch in the hopes of catching those thoughts in the downpour, and effectively drowning them. He told himself he was merely sulking, that no great revelations would find him--alone--on a Sunday afternoon in early December. 

Only, he supposed, if that became a trend.

He sank several hours into his work, and by the time he saw fit to sit back from the table and stretch, it felt deserved. He puttered around his kitchen, each step a reminder of a life he’d nearly forgotten. _His_ life--such as it was--in seemingly blissful solitude, held neatly in a home of his choosing, in a neighborhood better than any he’d imagined growing up. Every day, he awoke to a set of circumstances so far removed from where he’d begun. Every day, he awoke to a dream.

And while he’d spent a lifetime perfecting an air of invincibility touched with nonchalance, Barba knew better than anyone how spectacular his life had become, though people far removed from it often liked to look upon it and remind him of that fact. 

He alone tallied the time, energy, and work sank into his every move. NYU, Harvard, the DA’s office--he knew every cent of scholarship money and counted every confused look like interest paid on the product. He could count on one hand faces like his own--languages like his own--found when he searched some backroom or another, where deals were made and heavy palms were drawn together, licked wet with the condensation of a glass of something older than he was. 

Barba knew it was a gamble that he should have ever known this much, but to then risk it all with company, cut in a figure too much like his own? To walk into those rooms again with a man at his side begged the question: did he even know what all he had? Or did he simply not care to keep it?

And Barba could not very well explain to red, rounded faces, but--it all came back to his home, and the unpolished fact that he’d very much like to share it with someone.

It was too precious a sentiment, too dear a thing, Barba wasn’t sure he’d even conveyed as much to Carisi, who’d answered that dog whistle call, and left his indelible mark. He’d touched onto the field and started running plays, leading with confidence and thoughtfulness. He behaved not as though he’d been doing this all his life, but--like he’d been thinking about it.

Under the spell of his open refrigerator door, Barba stood like a canonized king, idly lifting up the tin foil sides of various dishes Carisi had cooked or brought there, and left for Barba to pick at. 

Barba settled on something of his own creation: a tin of mixed nuts--so mixed, because he’d emptied into it assorted half-eaten bags he’d procured from vending machines in the courthouse, and inevitably found some time later, twisted closed and tossed into his briefcase. 

He dug into them while channel surfing through assorted news programs and sporting events, eventually settling on a Miami Dolphins game because the weather looked nice. It was the usual Sunday fare, and reason enough for Barba to better find himself in his office, or sleeping off a Saturday night that didn’t presuppose the coming early morning. With the former of those things unavailable to him--by either the cold or his total disinterest in venturing out into it again--Barba chose the latter, and dozed comfortably on his couch, slumped against a propped arm and undone fist. 

He napped, stirring intermittently to rearrange himself or mute the television. When he awoke, groggy and stiff-necked--it was dark, though by no means late, but such was the drag of winter.

A singular pocket of light caught his attention. It seemed entirely too far away, at a depth where a man’s sight could never reach. Barba blinked a few times and it drew closer, and brought with it light’s most common company: warmth.

Specifically, new warmth. It was rising from his stovetop, but stood over it, too, in socked feet and an unwashed flannel buttondown over a t-shirt that still bore the lines from how snugly it was folded into a vacuum-sealed pack of three. 

Barba smiled at the sight, and sat up to better orient his view. 

He was convinced it was the sink of sleep into the haze of wakefulness that allowed him to smile sweetly and hold his tongue, when he wanted very much to call out and startle Carisi. Barba said nothing, opting instead to watch Carisi occupy the space, to reach for things without a second thought as to their placement, to be at home. 

Barba revelled in all that there was to enjoy about that fact. 

But there was stiffness in Carisi’s hunched shoulders, enough that Barba could spy it without searching. It confronted him, to the point that Barba felt ashamed to look on it any longer without acting. 

But then, he’d always had something of a masochistic streak. 

He stared and counted the seconds. They chipped away like bits of stone. In one last, awful strike, Barba heard a break in Carisi’s voice as he sighed. He watched one of Carisi’s hands raise to brush swiftly at his face. 

And with that, the painted veil of a drowsy Sunday respite was lifted. Barba felt a fire light under him, and he was off the couch and by Carisi’s side in an instant. 

“Hey. Come here.” 

There was no telling what startled Carisi worse--Barba’s words, or his sudden appearance at his side, which preceded a slow reunion between their bodies. Fingertips led Barba’s approach, but a strong arm soon followed, reaching over Carisi’s shoulders like a tree branch in search of open sky, then rocking him close. The addition of Barba’s hand moving so as to loosely grip Carisi was deliberate; Barba did not fall readily into the position of a caregiver, so this was a learned effort. 

It felt like a radical leap into unknown territory. Barba knew Carisi through sexual and emotional love, through admiration and adoration, too. He’d stroked the man’s anger and played up his desires, but he’d never tended to Carisi’s heart. Not so explicitly. 

Not, Barba knew with no lack of shame, like Carisi had done for him.

And Carisi had been impossibly kind and strong in that role, so it terrified Barba to attempt to recreate it. He was the understudy, and in this one instance in his life, he had not prepared.

But he found that so long as he opened himself up for Carisi, the younger man fit, and shaped Barba into what he needed. 

Presently, that need was little more than a hug. 

Carisi stood nestled near, hunched somewhat so as to feel the full weight and length of Barba’s curled arm. He shrank in closer and ducked, then moved against Barba with two long, unsettled breaths. He deliberately held his head low through it all. 

Barba brought his other arm into play and settled a warm, open palm along the small of Carisi’s back, where he rubbed slow, concentric circles. It was--admittedly--a move he’d pilfered not from his own motherly source, but from a recent observation. 

Benson, cradling Noah, promising him comfort beyond what words would convey. 

Barba supposed the sentiment mattered more over the arrangement, the positioning. The fact that he was emulating one of his dearest friends did not excuse the fact that’d he’d slotted in Carisi for the role of a toddler. 

_Distress,_ Barba reminded himself. That’s what he was treating, and neither age nor wisdom could always overcome it. 

Carisi sucked in a wet breath--then, suddenly, a _sob._

“What?” Barba all but pulled away. Bouts of sadness, he could manage--but a genuine outburst was well beyond his capabilities. “Excuse me, what?”

Carisi choked out another, then trailed it with an splintered laugh. He wasn't crying--far from it. He was far too emotionally drained to summon the strength to heave and produce tears. These were gasps of breath only--empty and searching for something into which to fill. An explanation, maybe. A better promise than those Carisi had made and failed to manifest, certainly, because he’d made them on behalf of others. It seemed a strange lesson to learn later in life, but it was clear to him now: objectives required more than a vessel, and he could not spill his efforts forth if the space denied them. 

He tried to pull away, embarrassed, but Barba would not let him hide.

“Oh, man. I don’t even know. Sorry. Sorry.”

“Hey…” 

Barba smoothed a hand through Carisi’s hair, and let it rest curled around the man’s cheek and jaw. Barba realized he’d forgotten how a face wore weariness--Carisi’s furrowed brow and clouded eyes were as they had been for weeks. Barba just as well saw those things on everyone he met during a day--himself included--and had excused the fact that people should not wear their upset as snugly as a skin, much less for so long that it should become one, and the changeover was unnoticed. 

This--the brunch, yes, but everything surrounding it--had been stressful for Carisi. Months of breaching the subject with his parents and family, hearing nary a positive word, then finally committing to the deed--and for what? For nothing to come of it, save for added aggravation for Barba, and strain on their relationship, and strangeness in Carisi’s home.

Even Carisi himself wondered if it would air out. Once winter had gone and the windows opened to spring, would the stink of disappointment taper out under doorways and clear the ventilation, and finally allow for the return of unmitigated love?

Or would his childhood home never feel the same after what he brought into it? His adulthood, now, if still tinged with childish fears. 

As Barba slowly came to recognize these truths, Carisi found words enough to clothe them in.

“I thought--I don’t know what I thought. I _thought_ they’d come around enough. I _thought_ I’d know what to do if they didn’t. I _thought_ I’d _thought_ about it.”

Therein was the whispered sting of Barba's own chastisements, and for Carisi to say as much while shaking in his own skin was something Barba would forever count among his greatest failures. It was the basis of their last--and lasting--fight, even: Barba’s judgmental attitudes as to how little foresight Carisi had, and the ways in which he did not yet know he could be hurt. 

And Barba had been right, every time. 

He knew that, but tried to make a metaphorical step back all the same. 

“You were hopeful,” he said. “That’s fine.”

“You don’t believe that,” Carisi muttered, and it was the first touch of bitterness Barba had heard from him in some time. He’d staved it off this long, it seemed, but no longer.

“I love that you do,” Barba insisted, his voice quiet, as if the distance he’d put between himself and Carisi was miles, not centimeters. “Still.”

“Yeah, and look where it got us.” 

Barba stood at arm’s length from Carisi and pretended as though he needed to take stock: they were in his home, dressed casually and warm while the City stood in cold defiance outside. Dinner was cooking. The apartment smelled of sweet pork and just a touch of Carisi’s cologne. 

“Here’s not so bad,” Barba said, and meant it. 

Carisi brushed at his face again, fussing even though it was dry. There was little he could do about the red discoloration in his cheeks, save for calming his spirits and accepting Barba at his word. 

He stood quietly for a time, then stopped feeling embarrassed for himself enough so as to look Barba in the eye. Barba had done away with formalities in a way that appeared as though he’d never known them--a skill Carisi envied. Carisi knew that much was his lot; always good-natured, he overshot things sometimes and came off looking like a goof.

Carisi could scarcely imagine Barba making that error. But then, that was Barba’s own doing: he never fashioned himself too high or too low. The man met Carisi’s gaze with unwavering assurance, looking for all of existence like he’d never been less, or felt beset with terror and grief greater than the sum of his own parts. This, despite the fact that Carisi had been drawn to him in a time when Barba stood far taller than his humble stature allowed, and came to love him when he’d been beaten down and thrown into a painful search of absence from his own self.

Somehow, this display of strength was as genuine as tears.

Just as a smile began to tug at one corner of Carisi’s mouth, his confidence seemed to seesaw as he studied Barba, perhaps coming away with more than he could handle. 

“I’m sorry Theresa brought up--everything.” 

He looked deeply ashamed, and Barba's heart sank at the prospect of how twisted the ugly ordeal still had Carisi. Barba was admittedly late on the take, but he knew Carisi's attentive nature--a watchful eye when they walked the streets, routinely checking that the windows and doors to Barba's apartment were secure, the calls to Barba's office when he couldn't reach his cell--were not entirely natural. They were stoked by a fear that getting to Barba wasn't impossible, that people could set a deadly intention on the man's head and find little obstruction. Neither Barba’s position of importance nor his proximity to those meant to protect him were the deterrents Carisi wished them to be. 

Reality had come closer than they all liked to think.

Than Carisi believed _Barba_ liked to think, certainly. 

His explanation was that much: “You don’t really talk about it, so I don’t, either.”

“I feel as though I’ve spoken of literally _nothing else_ for the past year,” Barba said, and was surprised not only by his own admission, but the unfettered honesty therein. It was true; he tried to keep those concerns bottled up until it availed him to divulge his apprehensions with his therapist. And in that sense, everything he felt about the very-near-death situation was concentrated. But Barba’s own heart was too small a vessel, and he feared he often spoke of the ordeal absently--through a look or a sigh--or else would one day slip up, and give his anxieties as much a public platform as they had a personal one. 

_Good morning, did you know I nearly died?_

_Waiter, could you bring me more water? A year ago I cried while I was forced to write a suicide note to my mother. I’m dehydrated!_

He continued, his mind chasing the words already spilling from his lips, “Or _done_ anything, really, without some conscious connection to it. Even you, here--” Barba shook his head listlessly, then retreated his hands into his pockets and shrugged. If Carisi could admit to his shortcomings, Barba could do the same--loathe though he was to do so.

“All of _this_ came from _that.”_

Carisi was momentarily silenced by how close to reality that vision fell. 

“I like to think I’d have found my way here, anyway,” he said, ever the optimist. 

“You _were_ sniffing around,” Barba allowed, and even chanced a smile. It was struck from his face, however, and reality stared him in the eye to remind him of his place. 

“That’s what I’d rather not discuss,” he said, still in search of an explanation even as he gave one. “That none of this was my doing so much as… occurred in my vicinity.” He reclined his shoulders and postured some, admitting with his body that whatever reservations he had about his behavior, they had not convoluted into self-pity or doubt. Only the smarting knowledge of a missed opportunity. 

He said, “I don’t like that I can’t lay a claim to going out and snatching you up.”

“I wouldn’t correct anybody sayin’ so,” Carisi teased, and stepped to Barba so that they were again pressed close. 

“Shush,” Barba said, but smirked all the same. 

In a moment so clear he heard it arrive in his mind, Barba thought now would be an ideal moment to sit Carisi down, then straddle him. Barba thought about stirring some warmth between them, and getting as far as they could before dinner started to burn. Barba imagined mussing that perfect coif of hair, and glossing those lips slick and pink before putting them to better use.

It was an entirely perfect composition, formed so clearly in his mind that Barba knew that whether he was drawing from memory or fantasy, both were available to him, and neither quite excluded the other. 

Barba knew if he started it--if he smirked and thumbed open his jeans, if he cocked his head just so--Carisi would see his vision to completion. 

But the day’s events were still too near. The animosity and upset--spilled like blood over asphalt, and baking there under a sun the likes of which the City wouldn’t see again until summer--caked over his skin. Barba envisioned only rubbing it all in deeper, sending those toxins into his bloodstream to wreak further havoc on his health. He saw much of the same for Carisi, and could not stand the thought.

So he stepped aside and let the idea pass him by completely. 

“What are you cooking?” 

Barba even managed to make himself sound genuinely curious.

“Braised pork. Polenta, too.” 

Barba forced a dissatisfied hum. “And I _was_ losing weight.”

“It’s supposed to be nice tomorrow. You could go for a run. Or tonight we could, I dunno…” 

His gaze fell somewhere below Barba’s throat. Carisi wasn’t so brazen as to stare in perpetuity at Barba’s crotch, but nor was that his sole destination. Unlike swathes of his older relatives, Carisi was no snowbird; he didn’t flock south at the first cool breeze. Carisi could just as well have longed for Barba’s strong middle, where his hairy chest was thick enough to get lost in. He could have set his gaze along the length of Barba’s shoulders, heavy and purposeful as his own two hands. Or he’d travel a hand along the length leg--from where his ass split him to where his toes curled in delight. The whole expanse of Barba had Carisi spellbound. 

Barba could have laughed-- _of course_ Carisi would circle his very thought, and not be able to hold his tongue for its saying. Barba even found himself entertaining the notion again, so long as he could stand dry under the banner that proclaimed _It Was Carisi’s Idea._

But even clean clothes and a nap had done little to ease the day’s passing, and Barba couldn’t touch his fingers to themselves without feeling the grit of the morning. 

“I have an early appearance in Chambers,” he said, but to Carisi’s ears, Barba supposed it might as well have been a lie. What did truth matter when all he felt were disappointments? 

Instead, Carisi made some soft noises towards agreement, adding that they should just eat and turn in, and finished with a smile much like those Barba had given that morning: joylessly, but with every good intention. 

Of course, Barba immediately saw the gesture for what it was. 

And at their coupled distancing from the other--masked though it was as individually arrived upon consensus--he thought grimly, _Aren’t we a pair?_

-

Monday morning, Carisi didn’t even have an opportunity to shed his winter coat before Rollins arrived at his side with a brief about the case she’d caught Sunday night. Her latest lead would take them to the suspect’s family home well outside of the city. Carisi nodded, made the appropriate comments about how he drove last time, and the time before that, and was Rollins’ license suspended or did she care to prove otherwise?

For his insolence, Carisi bought the coffee and pastries for the drive, and Rollins took the wheel.

Carisi read the casefile aloud, posing questions while Rollins answered through bites of a bear claw. 

“Ah!” Rollins said amidst a briefing of their suspects history with the law. Strands of her hair had caught themselves between her breakfast and her mouth, and with one hand still on the wheel, she couldn’t service either.

“You’re an animal,” Carisi tutted, but tucked her hair behind her ear all the same. “And you already spoke with the brother?”

“ _Spoke_ implies he had anything cognizant to say in return,” she said. 

“He, uh…”

Carisi trailed off as he watched the scene change outside his window.

“There’s been an accident on the Hudson Parkway,” Rollins explained as she took an early exit and set about after the I-87. They’d skip most of the congestion and pull back on after skirting the West Bronx and Fordham Heights. 

She watched the streets, same as Carisi. She saw people half-jog to their destination, the cold squaring their shoulders and braces their arms against their sides so that bare hands found refuge in jacket pockets. It cheered Rollins to see that New York did not yield for winter, not like all of Atlanta, if a frost set in and newscasters swore it was the worst it’s ever been, though the threshold for that was pretty weak. 

“How was your weekend?” Rollins asked--a simple enough question, though she’d pointedly waited until she and Carisi were well out of earshot of anyone else to ask it. She’d even given him distance from the City, as if it was yet another interloper on their lives. 

Carisi hummed in response, a low, slow vibration that reminded Rollins of home, and the drag of heavy semis cutting through residential neighborhoods, and the way her mother would hum her dissatisfaction. 

Her own tone became flat and assured as a result; she knew the answer to her own question. 

“Something happen?”

It was all the pushing she needed to do, and Carisi went careening off his silent edge and into a sea of harried explanation. He started to explain himself--which was nothing if not disconcerting, Rollins noted--by speaking to his motivations and desires. In hearing them aloud, Carisi supposed he better understood Barba’s indignation, and the story became mumbled and soft, drawn slow and deliberately through his own misgivings, and those of his family. 

Rollins was giving him a pitiable look by his end, but laughter touched her voice all the same when she said, “Oh, hell. You really gave it your all, there.” 

She couldn’t imagine Barba meeting Carisi’s family, much less on _their_ terms. If anything, she expected he’d take charge--set a reservation at some restaurant in the City better known for its drink options than its menu, summarily charm everyone, then cut out early with a call from work. 

Sunday Mass and a homecooked meal seemed well beyond his purview. 

Though it was a day after the fact, Carisi seemed inclined to agree. 

He was twisted in his seat, shrunken with the chagrin that discovered him overnight and followed him into work. It laid heavy over his shoulders, having snuck in between layers of shift, vest, jacket, and coat. It was a complete outfit: Carisi and his newfound shame. 

He wriggled about in it, searching for comfort. He happened on nothing of the sort, and when he next spoke, Carisi’s words reflected his irritation. 

“Yeah. It’s not that they didn’t like him, it’s… they didn’t want to. Didn’t even give him a chance, you know?” 

Carisi hesitated to say more. Already, the exchange sounded childish, and his complaining about it came off no better. 

“Your sisters didn’t back you up? They know how bringing a boyfriend home can be.” 

“Even _that_ was never like _this,”_ Carisi said. Both understood how their conversation was paced and read, as if scripted. Rollins glazed over the fact that these problems were long-overdue, and played up Carisi’s own fantasy that his life now was only coming around to normal. Carisi let Rollins believe he still thought that way.

Carisi continued, unsure, “He--well, I know he was mad, but he _seemed_ kind of hurt, too.” Then, like the crack of a whip had come down on his very earnest sentiments, Carisi uttered a oft-visited phrase between himself and his partner: “Rollins, seriously, _you can’t repeat this.”_

Such was another leg of their unspoken arrangement: just as Carisi had been a shoulder for her to lean on during Jesse’s early months, and she would, in turn, take up the task of bearing witness to the bizarre instance of his first same-sex relationship, complete with the company of none other than their shared ADA. Rollins had expected more tumultuous goings-on, truth be told. The Barba she knew was short-tempered and silver-tongued, a smart aleck who, if he indeed _had a heart,_ allowed it only to function, and never prevail over his shrewd mind. 

She was pleasantly surprised when Carisi alluded to Barba’s kindness and openness with him. Carisi acted as though he’d been sainted by Barba’s attention, and for that Rollins still caught herself feeling suspect. But then she saw Barba, too, with a soft smile for a text from Carisi, or an offhand word to suggest their thoughtful collaboration when--surely--there was not time enough in the day for such talk. When but at night could they have discussed a case’s merits, if it had been caught the previous morning and Barba had been in court all day with another matter entirely? Out of respect of a sense of self-preservation, no one called Barba out on that tendency. 

(Carisi did it, too, but was not granted the same leeway. He’d stop a brainstorming session in the station cold with an assured, _Barba doesn’t want to even touch the kidnapping charge,_ or something to that effect, with such certainty as to prompt--usually from Fin--a coy, _You can read his mind, now?)_

Rollins liked to let Barba catch her looking at him sometimes, just to leave him wondering what it was she knew. 

“I never do,” Rollins said smartly. “Except verbatim, to Jesse, because it’s important to talk to babies.”

Carisi rolled his eyes, but accepted the terms. 

“Okay. But keep Frannie out of the room. I got a good rapport with her and I don’t wanna be sullied any in her eyes.” 

The snow began to clear in color, and Rollins knew they were north enough that Yonkers was nearer to them than not. 

“I shouldn’t have sprung that on him,” Carisi said. He may have had a similar inkling: the City was at his back, now, and anything he said from this point on would not reach a single soul there.

“Yeah, _no._ ” 

While Rollins had hastened her agreement, she fell back just as fast on kindly platitudes. Carisi’s sulking had that effect on her. 

“But it’s also not as bad as you think,” she said. “I mean, Barba can hold a grudge, sure. But you’re entrenched enough in his good graces.” 

Truthfully, this much continued to vex Rollins. She knew feelings of deep affection--whether they be love or merely some shadow of its ever-changing form--could drive a person to distraction. She believed wholeheartedly that Carisi wanted to be distracted. 

She’d always had her doubts about Barba, though.

Rollins pushed them aside for now and added cheekily, “I even hear that he likes you.”

Carisi _blushed,_ of all things. Like this was the first he was hearing of it, and nothing--not the sneaking around, the coming out, the vacations, or the dragging of their names through the professional muck--stood taller than the teasing word of a trusted friend. 

_Oh boy,_ Rollins thought. _Is this boy in it deep._

“Yeah?”

_Boy, oh boy._

“I think you’re in the clear.”

“I like him, too.”

But his smile died too quickly, and by Rollins’ count, first left by way of his eyes. 

“Is there something else?”

Carisi seemed poised to attempt an answer, but held back. “Nah. Just… more family stuff.” 

“Isn’t it always,” Rollins hummed. She didn’t press the matter--there weren’t words enough in the English language to explain her own family, so she wouldn’t ask that impossible task of Carisi. She gave him a smile--sweet as any lie, another product of her upbringing. 

“Forget about it,” she said. Her own best advice. _Forget,_ until it showed up at your door. 

Carisi smiled for her, too. All dimples.

“I’m tryin’.” 

-

Barba’s subsequent Saturday was a quiet affair: there was no impending appointment with his maker, no embodiment of the Rehnquist Court to set an opinion of his character and prospects.

Just himself, the day’s second glass of scotch, and the _New York Times._

A year ago, he’d have wanted for only this. 

A year ago, he didn’t have Carisi. 

Carisi, who had gotten Barba drunk and twice pleasured him the night before, and laughed when Barba, even in a sloping fit of ecstasy, found focus enough to scribble the number _10_ on the back of a legal pad, and declare of Carisi’s performance, _A real crowd-pleaser._

Carisi, who had received a phone call from Fin at five the following morning, and had to extricate himself from the one-armed hold Barba had him in, stepping out only on the promise that they’d pick things up when he got back. 

This thought found and repeatedly stalked his mind, and Barba supposed if anything _should_ keep him from completing the crossword, it was a forlorn heart. 

Or an empty bed, if Barba was being entirely honest with himself. 

He checked his phone, finding the most recent message to _still_ be hours old, and from Benson, not Carisi. 

_[Situation averted. He’s all yours.]_

Satisfied that Carisi must have looked anxious to finish his unexpected weekend shift and spend the day together, he’d smartly written back, _[There goes my quiet Saturday. Enjoy yours.]_

But Carisi hadn’t come bounding up the stairs in Barba’s apartment building, or collided into the door with his key, full of suggestions about what they should do or where they should eat (but doing neither, choosing instead to sink himself into bed, _to Barba,_ to get the weekend started off right). 

And by the time Barba realized he was waiting for exactly that, he gave it up. He settled in and tried to answer the day’s great, gaping expanse on his own, and was disturbed how long it took him to fall into that groove. 

Disturbed, too, by how quickly he lost his footing there.

All the ease, the comfort he had in his own self, alone with his thoughts, came in fits and starts. The simplest thing struck him from his balancing act; silence that bombarded him one second, and mystified him the next. How had it gone on so long, and how was it that Barba had not noticed--or not minded--its absence from his routine? 

Barba was reminded of all the nights he spent in his old apartment, his heart stopping at every unfamiliar sound drawing through the quiet. Footsteps outside the building or in the hallway were the least of it; Barba chalked up at least one sleepless night to none other than the drumming hum of his refrigerator, and then another night to the anger that followed the realization. He wasn’t safe because he allowed himself to be swept up in fear, and what he heard wasn’t coming from some unknown source--it was all calibrated in his own personal echo chamber, and none but he was to blame.

Barba remembered his turning point, the last of those nights. He’d stirred himself into tizzy enough that Carisi came by, and stayed the night. And out of desperation and shrewd calculation, Barba made him stay. 

And Barba wasn’t so bored anymore, and his evenings weren’t so mild.

Hadn’t been, for some time.

Hadn’t been, until recently.

Deciding that he should neither keep himself waiting nor occupy himself with appearing _not_ to be waiting, Barba abandoned the limbo that was his couch. He hustled himself into a coat, scarf, and boots, and decided that he did not have to suffer the silence; that was not his life anymore. 

The cold air was refreshing, and fooled him just long enough into thinking the City was cleaner for it. The first thing Barba saw stepping away from his building was the tree planted just ahead of it. For the holiday season, it was decorated with looping strings of white lights, which blinked to life as the skies darkened earlier and earlier each day. Carisi had been particularly cheered by the thing’s composition, and insisted to Barba that this was proof--above all else, even crime stats he claimed to have not looked into--that the neighborhood was a safe one. 

_“I’ve counted. Six days those lights have been up, and six days no one has stripped them off the branches. This is the safest block in the City. No doubt about it.”_

At the time, Barba didn’t have the heart to remind him that his life had been threatened through his work, and the natural progression of any evil intention _would_ be to follow him home, so long as he laid his head anywhere other than his desk after a long day. But he’d since escaped that kind of reductive thinking, himself. 

Therapy was a wonder. 

New York City, too. 

Since his ordeal, Barba had been mugged once and found the experience refreshing. He lost forty dollars only--his _mug me_ money, a constant companion tucked neatly into his front jacket pocket. It was well worth the price of not having to reapply for an ID, or cancel his credit cards. He laughed about it after--and very nearly at the time, too--and couldn’t shake his smile even when seeing Carisi later, who remained oblivious to Barba’s afternoon exploits, limited though they were to surrendering petty cash and replacing it in three blocks’ time. 

_These things happen,_ he’d told himself cheerfully, and went about his day.

He realized in retrospect that his good sense had been perverted by profound dispensation towards the extreme. 

That his laughter was not joy or pleasure, but the expulsion of terror by other means. 

Therapy was a buzzkill.

Presently, Barba walked a couple blocks to a favorite spot of his and Carisi’s, found in Carisi’s explicit effort to make Barba love his new neighborhood. Barba smiled and went along with it for the most part, though both men knew the place was unknown to would-be assassins and killer cops, and that alone was worth the exorbitant realtor's fee.

The restaurant was small, a place with eclectic tastes depending on the chefs that cycled through. Only the drink menu--save for those absurd cocktails that fell in and out of fashion--was deep and assuring. Barba never took qualms with that.

And so it was in that spur of the moment dash from his building that Barba--the very man who once gave his home address in the same conversation where being thrown down marble stairs was proposed--discovered he did, in fact, have a sense of self preservation. 

Just two steps shy of reaching the door, he spied a familiar face in the restaurant’s windowed front, and kept walking. His gait never broke, or stalled, and his face remained that unfazed steel of any true New Yorker. He could have just as well walked by a horde of fornicating octogenarians, and still never batted an eye. 

What he saw in truth was--somehow--demonstrably worse.

In the barest glimpse, Barba saw this much: Carisi, smiling and pink-cheeked from the cold, was having a drink with another man. 

In a single second, Barba had no information beyond that. One face known, the other not, and all the positioning to suggest something else. 

He took that information--categorized it, accepted it--but allotted nothing like feeling one way or the other, with the tactic exception that he’d engendered into the sight a right and a wrong outcome, though he favored neither. He purposefully crossed down the block on his return jaunt, so as not to pass the restaurant again and risk a second look.

To risk tipping the scales. 

He took quick, sharp steps along the far edge of curb closest to the street. He knew this way wrought slush and a terrible proximity to the bleeding wet street, but traffic in the City never buzzed so fast as to make tsunamis out of puddles. He let his mind rest there, in that green, familiar place of concern--not for his own person, but for the clothes on his back, and the image he cast. 

It was a diversion that only lasted so long; he was dressed down, anyway. The long lines of his outfit of jeans and a button-down patterned in a soft grey check were all but lost to the puff of his casual winter coat and the twist of a striped scarf that grazed his cheeks. His face felt warm but the tips of his ears were exposed to the cold, and though Barba doubted it was the weather’s doing, he felt slowly drained, as if he had been turned over and spilled. 

Walking home, he felt uneasy, and not unlike he had when he inadvertently tripped up his own security detail. They’d think him in his office or court, and with his mind occupied with work, he’d simply gone about his usual shortcuts to coffee, preferred cafes, or vendors. They often intersected on Barba’s return trip, which was itself a trial. 

They’d looked at him as though he’d purposefully risked his life for a _Halal Guys_ gyro.

Barba arrived swiftly at home, moving as though he half-expected his path to be interrupted, and for an interrogation to commence.

 _What do you think you’re doing?_

_Sleeping with this boy? Loving him?_

_Are you out of your mind?_

Inside, he drifted through the motions. Everything into its proper place, and himself, deposited back on the couch. It was as though he’d gotten away with something he’d never intended. A genuine accident of fate, yet he felt at tremendous fault. 

He took up the newspaper again and set about reading through the same articles. He filled his head with the imagined sound of his own voice, but was only met with a buzzing between his ears. Barba didn’t have patience enough for the words of others, but he had sense enough not to listen for his own. 

After that, he no longer dreaded the coming silence. 

For some time he was low and quiet, as if he was impossibly young again and had met those unfathomable injustices of the time: a cruel teacher, torrential weekend rains, a dead animal. 

When he received a text from Carisi asking if he wanted anything from the restaurant, Barba answered it, but--not really. 

_[I was just by there]_

When Carisi fit his key into the lock and let himself into the apartment twenty minutes later, Barba issued a silent, spontaneous prayer. 

_Stay here. Stay home._

Carisi set about undressing from his winter clothes--gloves first, hat last, always--and unpacking the carry-out. He smiled brightly for Barba, who left the couch and slowly approached the bar countertop in the kitchen, standing just beyond it, as if he was wary of whatever Carisi had ordered for him. 

He got a whiff of chicken and lime, however, and knew Carisi had made an excellent selection.

“All yours. I--already ate.” After a beat Carisi added, “I ran into someone, so.”

“Yeah, I saw.” Barba could have laughed at himself for his hesitance to simply come out and say-- _something._

_Anything._

Even planting his concern in the heart of a joke would better serve him than his current stone-throwing.

Instead, he threw another stone. It landed wide of his target.

“Someone from GOAL?” 

Fork and plate in hand, Carisi stalled. 

“Um.” 

The next stone landed at Carisi’s feet.

“Someone from GOAL’s Hesitation Division?” Barba asked, and wearily picked up the smile Carisi had dropped. It set it on his own face--a placeholder amidst the day’s worth of stubble framing his cheeks. He made a handsome, easy vision, and Carisi was momentarily caught off guard by its appearance on the scene.

“I didn’t follow you,” Barba said, because he sensed Carisi’s unease and shrewdly decided to capitalize on it. “You’re the tallest person in the City. I spotted you.”

“Ha ha.”

“So…” Barba prompted, and took stock of Carisi then: the man was warm again in the cheeks, and flustered--but not daunted. Not knowingly caught in some great error. He looked duly ashamed, but not for the egregious crimes Barba imagined. 

“Oh,” Barba realized, suddenly embarrassed, himself. He smirked, then, pleased with having figured Carisi out. His smiling face in the restaurant, his cartoonish reluctance to speak on it now. Barba could have laughed at his own relief, and anticipated much the same from Carisi. 

“You were being _hit on._ My mistake.” 

“Raf…” Carisi ran a hand over his face. “You’re real, real close.”

The bemusement drained from Barba’s face. That wasn’t what he’d expected. From Carisi, Barba imagined a reddened face and a big, joyful turn. Something like excitement that he’d been party to someone’s efforts in that way, and the realization what he must have been like, crushing on Barba as long as he had. 

Barba felt his gut constrict in a sudden wave of nausea. He played it off as a gut-reaction to burnt chicken skin or artificial lime scent. 

“Well don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Okay, so…” Carisi started, then hedged. Worse, he seemed physically hung up on the notion of giving Barba the full truth. He raised his shoulders in a body-morphing shrug, a gesture that should have left him loose, but only served to shrink his form. 

“My parents--my _mom_ \--may have… set me up.”

“I’m… assuming you’re not about to ask me for a clean passport and my discretion when your colleagues come around asking after a corpse,” Barba said. “Set you up _how?_ ”

“...Like, on a date.”

“A date,” Barba echoed. It sounded more absurd coming from Carisi’s lips than it had ping-ponging through Barba’s mind all afternoon. Still, some part of him was relieved. Carisi met the notion with embarrassment, and that was nearer to where Barba wanted to be than not. 

But he wasn’t pleased by any measure.

“And you couldn’t say no? Couldn’t think of _one_ reason to maybe pass on that?” 

Carisi threw up his hands. _“Of course_ I said no, but they didn’t give me his number to pass that along, so I had to show up and explain--you know--how these people who raised a human man could somehow behave like jackals.”

“And that took two hours?” This, Barba had to guess at, based on when he first spotted Carisi and how long he spent stewing, after. Carisi did not dispute his estimate. 

“We got to talking, is all. We have a lot in common. Might have been three hours if your cryptic text hadn’t dampened the mood.” 

“There was a mood?” 

“Now you're just purposefully misunderstanding things.” 

“Mm. Deflection. Bold move.”

Barba lit the comment off like a shot, and Carisi fired back accordingly.

“I don’t know what the big deal is. I _know_ this is ridiculous. I’ve told my mom and Theresa that I’m not interested in any of these guys--” 

_“Any of these guys?”_ Barba repeated, and it wasn’t lost on either man how the tone was wholly transplanted from the courtroom. He meant to shatter Carisi’s argument in front of the man’s very face. “How many are we talking?” 

Finally, Carisi burst forth with the laughter Barba had expected, except it was all bluster, relief, and spilled nerves. He couldn’t even smile through it. 

“I know it looks bad, but it’s good. My mom--she’s coming around to the bigger picture. That’s important, that’s _essential._ ”

“Really?” Barba asked, now itching for a fight. If Carisi wasn’t up for at least _playing_ the conciliatory role, Barba would needle him well beyond that point. “Because as one amongst an apparent _harem_ of men, I feel excessive.” 

“Look--it’s dumb. I’m right there with you. So, I wasn’t going to bother you with it.”

Barba shelved his arms across his chest and cocked his head. “You didn’t want me to be a third wheel on your date. How considerate.” 

“It was. Not. A. Date.” 

Barba’s arms went slack, and for a moment--his defenses went with them. And Carisi caught just a glimpse of Barba, feeling lied to, feeling foolish. Looking tired. 

“Carisi. Just the fact that you’re entertaining your family’s… ideas--like this--is just…” Barba stopped short. He remembered that he’d made his arguments already. What was called for now was his ultimatum.

“I’ll tell you this now, as it seems to somehow have escaped the miniscule air pocket that is your mind where it pertains to matters of incorruptible pride--i.e., mine. You ready?” 

Carisi--for his part--looked mildly terrified. 

“I won’t associate with people who would conspire to ruin my relationships with loved ones, to negate your place at my side, or mine at yours, for as long as we are agreed to want those places. This means your family, this means my family. I’m not particular. It’s a rather hard line.”

It was a clear declaration--as well as stern, dispassionate, and patently simple. It set fire to Barba’s old method of huffy dissociations, and suffused the apartment with new life. 

And immediately, Carisi wanted to agree, to rally, to champion Barba’s position as his own. But he knew, too, what was stopping him. 

Another question nagged at him, and before Carisi could acquiesce to Barba’s terms or continue to wedge in his own, he asked, “Why’d I think it was just you and your mom?” 

Such was the impression Barba gave, even when he spoke of times when his father was still around, or alive--which were, Carisi had come to learn, two vastly different planes of existence.

Barba seemed surprised by the question. 

“There are… cousins, mostly. Aunts and uncles. Family friends. The whole of my father’s side.” Barba squared his shoulders; it really wasn’t much, really, and it wasn’t any of Carisi’s concern, besides. “We’re not Italian, there’s been an embargo, I’ve been spared siblings.”

“An embargo on siblings,” Carisi mused, his voice edging on wistful. 

“Jealous?” 

“Kind of,” Carisi admitted. Then, with a great heaving of breath, he took a seat at the table. They’d circled one another while dishing insults and serving questions with a razor’s edge. Carisi had come away from the safety of the kitchen in that time, while Barba had only done some footwork, turning so as to never once let Carisi dash out from under his scrutiny.

The young man’s sorry expression was becoming all too familiar to Barba now. He’d seen it only a week ago, besmirching his good looks until every smile and coy glance came roaring back into place--the following Monday, was it? And held tight since then? 

Barba wondered, if Carisi _were_ to put on a show, which face would fool more onlookers? The smile he put on every day, or the abiding sadness he scarcely let slip? 

“Somehow, in their minds, this makes total sense.” Carisi ran a hand over his mouth, down his throat, then lost his fingers into the collar of his shirt, which he’d loosened somewhere between his early shift and lunch date. ( _It was not a date,_ he reminded himself.) 

He reached out to that one, glimmering hope he had--still visible, still within reach. He already had Barba, which had long seemed to him the greater challenge. What was overcoming family strife and decades of denial compared to loving another man? This man, who had put himself into this covenant of trust with both the law and its seekers, unflinchingly strove towards justice, and found greatness along the same path? 

What was there not to love?

“But they’re going to like you, okay? I promise.” 

“It’s fine if they don’t,” Barba said, though the sentiment had lost all meaning to him, now. 

“Are you crazy? After all this? No it’s not.” 

“It had better be.” 

Barba stared at Carisi for a time, studying the look of bewilderment on his face. He found himself thinking of Meryl Corben, the empathy he had for her, as well as the limited options that overrode it. 

He went to Carisi under slow steps that masked his purpose for arriving there, just inches from the man as he sat dejectedly before him. Barba put his hands on Carisi’s cheeks--still cold--and then set the man’s hair back in tender strokes. Carisi lifted his gaze in search of Barba’s, but Barba’s thoughts were somewhere else, and his eyes half-lidded, and there was no underlying message there waiting to be met.

“Honestly,” he said, just this side of sweet so as to confuse Carisi further, “I don’t give a shit.”

He turned on his heel and collected his coat from where it hung in the still-open closet near the door. 

“I’m going back to the office,” he said, a succinct end to what was--undoubtedly--a rollercoaster of an argument. Carisi even laughed after its saying.

“Seriously?”

Barba shrugged into his coat and met Carisi with a flat look. “I have actual work to do,” he said. “And I forgot a file on my desk. I need to review it before Monday.”

Carisi’s shoulders sagged. Barba’s voice seemingly held no ill-will, but Carisi knew better than to mistake a momentary ceasefire for a truce.

“Oh. Okay. Can I help with anything?”

Carisi walked half a step after Barba, who’d gone around him to collect his discarded scarf from where he’d left it on the living room couch. 

“You know you can’t,” Barba dismissed, and neatly looped the striped cashmere number around his neck. Carisi’s hands were on him in an instant, absently straightening out the lengths of ends.

“I miss working with you,” he said, quieter than intended. “Don’t start--I know the alternative. It was just, kind of--first loves, you know?” 

“Yes, I know. You only ever wanted me for my courthouse ID.”

“I mean… you take a great picture.”

Carisi put Barba’s untouched meal in the fridge, then gathered his own coat, scarf, and hat, and was soon only a half-a-step behind the man. He figured he’d catch up on some sleep at his own apartment, or visit Rollins and Jesse. Rollins had been complaining about the _Mommy and Me_ class she’d been taking, and Carisi thought it’d be a hoot to watch her suffer through what amounted to two hours of baby yoga. 

“Walk you to the subway?” Carisi asked, a sly grin on his face.

He _always_ asked, and Barba _always_ answered--

“I don’t take the subway.”

The man was whisked away in a taxi not a moment later.

Carisi’s phone buzzed with the arrival of a text. He assumed Barba had forgotten something, or the downward dog pose had opened Rollins’ third eye and she was reading his mind.

It was Daniel, his not-date from the restaurant, who had exchanged numbers with Carisi on the back of a line even Carisi figured didn’t get much play. 

_Just in case this happens again._

_[Hey! U said you’d never been to a club, so………]_

Another text brought an address and time, as well as the names of a few of Daniel’s friends who were up for coming along. According to Daniel, they’d been first-timers once.

Carisi smiled at the effort, and even found himself considering it. The last text won him over.

_[Bring your man!]_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are gonna get messy, eyyyyyyyy


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys :'''')
> 
> For everyone who has read, commented, left kudos, or shared an encouraging word of tumblr--I thank you. You're tremendous. Your time and your words are invaluable. 
> 
> And here's, like, a couple thousand of my words in return.

In recent months, Sonny Carisi’s apartment had begun to feel alien to him. There was not a belonging out of place, which was very much part of the curious state of it all. Every item’s positioning held while Carisi was away--most nights a week, it seemed upon reflection--and stood in wait of his return.

He spent the afternoon clearing dust off his bookshelves and deleting old programming from his DVR. He threw out some expired milk, but did not make a note to himself to buy more.

No longer a disorderly labyrinth of collected projects, Carisi’s home felt larger and more considered. His law school books were all neatly kept, not thrown open on every available surface for reading at a glance as he slept, sat, cooked, or shat. Even the miss-matched cushion on his couch (the friend he bought it off of swore he didn’t know how it happened, either) had the look of artful planning. This was a kept place, even as use of it fell further away from him. 

There was nothing to suggest Barba’s presence in Carisi’s home--not to the extent Carisi held a place in his, certainly. There were only those few holes dug out of Carisi’s wardrobe and library that suggested there was someone else in his life, someone he was driven to seek out at every opportunity, and carry with him on the journey only those few essentials.

When evening approached and his plans drew nearer than not, Carisi was stirred from his lazy channel surfing and prompted to send after Barba, his work plans, and his willingness to surrender them.

_[u want to get drinks later at this bar Tesla’s?]_

The reply was nearly immediate, and, in terms of length and content, Carisi wasn’t surprised that Barba should have quick thumbs to suit his sharp mind.

_[Did you mean to ask, ‘are you barely twenty and not at all concerned with the unhygienic nature of bodyshots?’]_

And chasing afterwards, _[Not really, no.]_

Carisi didn't wonder long on how Barba should know that, and took the man at his word.

_[can I go?]_

_[???]_ Barba wrote back, and then, _[No son I forbid it]_

Carisi laughed aloud in his otherwise empty apartment. He stood, stretched, and abandoned his phone on the coffee table for a quick shower. 

When he returned, Barba had sent a more tame and agreeable, _[Of course. Have fun]_

Just as Carisi deemed himself satisfied that his shirt-and-sneaker selection did not date him--or worse, scream out in desperation for a disappearing youth--and was preparing to leave, he felt a surge of the same foolishness that had twisted his mind into a tizzy earlier that day. He sent Barba another text. 

_[You sure?]_  
_[You don't want to go, I mean]_

When he finally received a reply, Carisi was standing idly on a subway platform, still uncertain as to whether he would be traveling downtown to the bar, or uptown, to meet Barba at his apartment. 

_[Unless you absolutely need me to chaperone, no. Not particularly.]_  
_[Have a good time.]_

It was as definitive a word on the matter as Carisi was going to get, and he pocketed his phone with confidence. Excitement blurred with his nerves, and Carisi felt a rush he hadn't known since his days in Homicide. 

The _chase,_ back before it was sullied by repetition and the banal air of tragedy. Before he knew better. 

Forgetting all that time had taught him, Carisi felt he had something in his sights. 

-

Tesla’s was the kind of place Carisi had never been--with his sexual identity very much coming to fruition through the full force of his relationship with Barba behind him, he didn’t see the need--but was excited to be in, just this once. Far from some dingy den of ill-repute, the bar was lit like the roller rinks of Carisi’s youth, a hot-spot for any hormone-ravaged middle schooler on a weekend. Under a great showing of neon lights streaming green and blue, or yellow and pink, depending on whether one was on the dance floor or nearer to the bar, Telsa’s looked like the RollerRama on a Saturday night.

Carisi supposed the copious amounts of alcohol served at a legally-tended bar stood in difference to the two locales, but the hokey elements still held in his favor. 

The scene could not have stood in greater opposition to the fumbled hand-holding and candy-sweet first kisses of distant memory. Here, men coaxed and vied for the attention of others, or set out plainly and gave some, hoping for a return on their investment. The efforts were casual, confidence, and unmistakable. 

Carisi was hypnotized by the apparent ease of it all, and wondered if any of the men in attendance ever saw this for themselves, or if Carisi wasn’t confusing ease for relief. 

Because here, they certainly had it.

Carisi was especially heartened by Daniel’s presence. The man was the spitting image of the guys Carisi knew growing up on Staten Island--dark-haired and handsome, carrying weight and muscle around like they were looking for a fight to put it to use, but smiling sweetly all the while. 

Carisi wondered how Daniel had come so far, so fast, when Carisi himself had only just arrived. 

“So you’ve never gone to a gay bar before?” Ian asked. Short and sporting a well-maintained beard, he was one half of the pair Daniel had brought along. He was sat next to Gareth at the bar, the leaner of the two, who had kind, brown eyes set low under heavy brows and thick glasses. Carisi thought he looked like the perpetual grad students he saw around Fordham. 

It was as though he’d read the wonderment on Carisi’s face, and only phrased the fact as a question because a life in polite society demanded it of him.

“Not growing up--no way. But for work, sure. Usually after-hours, though. When the mood’s not as, uh, festive.” Carisi took a much-needed sip of beer, and only then realized how his answer was wanting for an explanation. “I’m a detective. Manhattan Special Victims.”

Gareth, who was already well into his second drink, leaned over to Daniel and said in a stage whisper, “I thought you said you were meeting a lawyer?”

“I just passed the bar,” Carisi answered with a half-smile. He didn't linger on the fact that those terms were outdated, now. A year ago, he'd _just_ passed the bar, and a year ago, he'd felt like he couldn't take that next step. 

And since then, he really hadn't wanted to. Any compulsion for forward motion was met in his personal life, and Carisi had gladly found the activity there to be non-stop. 

“I just _leased_ a bar,” Gareth said.

Daniel and Ian shook their heads at this--old news, Carisi gathered, but Gareth seemed pleased with himself, still. 

Carisi raised his glass and said, “Hey, congratulations. Why aren’t we drinking there, huh?”

“Tell him,” Ian grinned. 

“It might… still… be a Chuck E. Cheese.” 

“He’s going to keep the animatronic rats,” Daniel said. “For the aesthetic.” 

Carisi nodded-- _as one does._

“Oh, so you’re from Brooklyn,” he teased, and didn’t miss the pleased look Ian sent Daniel, all hiked eyebrows and smile that trapped itself in a long, thin line. Daniel brushed it off. Though categorically a win as far as first impressions, Carisi knew the effort was already lost. Daniel had built up the notion of his blind date--maybe just the novelty of it all--and his friends--kinder to him than reality would ever be--still sought to believe the thing had a chance. 

“You’re goddamn right,” Gareth said.

“By way of _Virginia,_ ” Daniel added.

“So while he’s chasing that pipedream,” Ian explained, a hand coming to rest familiarly on Gareth’s back, “I keep us housed and fed. I work in IT. I mean, if my physique and facial hair hadn’t tipped you off.”

“It’s mandatory,” Gareth said, nodding earnestly. 

“You two seem like a good couple,” Carisi said, then seemed to remember himself--a former self, really, who spoke too earnestly and was quickly chastised for it. “If you don’t mind me sayin’.” 

“God, no, we love compliments. Keep ‘em coming. Lie, if you have to.”

Ian cut into Gareth’s joking tear, asking pointedly of Daniel and Carisi, “Speaking of--young, gay, _out_ Staten Islanders? Sitting here, looking like some grandchild-hungry nonny’s worst nightmare? Why didn’t this work out?” 

Daniel started, “Well…” 

In faux surprise, Ian turned to Carisi and inspected him like one might examine a rare and precious stone. “Are you a bottom, too?”

“Haha, uh, I’ve got a boyfriend, actually.” Carisi knocked twice on the wood of the slick bar top and added, “Going on a year, now.”

“So is he coming by later, or…?”

“Uh, he’s not. Coming. He didn’t think _this,_ ” Carisi gestured between himself and Daniel, rightfully assuming that if his friends didn’t already know the whole cringe-worthy score, they’d get it out of the soft-spoken Daniel in time, “Whole thing was so funny.” 

“Should I be worried?” 

Daniel, who had suffered through a camera roll of pictures when he first met Carisi earlier that day, knew Barba to be a well-dressed, broad-shouldered, and--if the pictures were any indication--mostly _surly_ individual.

Carisi smiled and waved a hand, dismissing the very idea. As if Daniel had posed the notion of a lamb, and not a wolf fit snugly in one’s clothing. 

(Barba's favored wool three-piece suits seemed a little on the nose, truth be told.)

“Actually, he’s an Assistant District Attorney, and the job is kinda non-stop, so he had to work.” 

Carisi’s gaze fell away from Daniel and found instead a cavalcade of men, in tank tops if anything at all, and seemingly blissfully unaware of the season. Some wore clothes that were slinky and loose, and Carisi's stomach warmed over when he realized some had had smooth, practiced faces and were in women's clothes to complete the image. Looking around, Carisi saw that no one seemed to mind. 

Still, they were the outlier among men dressed casually, or as casual as a disheveled, after-hours dress shirt with the lingering stink of coffee and ink toner would allow. 

“This isn’t really his scene, anyway,” Carisi finished.

Ian stared, too. “My man, read your history. This has always been our scene.”

“I know the guy in the red mini,” Gareth offered.

Ian shot him a look. “You do _not.”_

“I do! He works at one of the banks that rejected my loan application! I think he’s an accountant.”

Ian looked the man over. “Why even _bother.”_

Gareth spoke into the lip of his beer: “Because being hot shit at a bar that doesn’t even charge a cover doesn’t pay the bills, sweetie.” 

The two continued to argue pettily, but every sour word was couched in something endlessly sweet. Time, Carisi figured. These men were young yet, but had between them an old familiarity. 

Carisi watched the group until they disappeared into the crowd at the other side of the bar, where a mass of arms and bobbing heads swayed and jostled under pulsing lights and music. 

He didn't notice the slow smile draw itself like sunlight across Daniel’s face until he turned and was blinded by it.

Daniel asked, “You want to drink more or dance?”

 _Drink,_ Carisi thought at once. And watch, and learn. He wanted to see first how all this was done before he made an effort, himself. The motions looked choreographed in their precision, and Carisi did not know where to begin. He was kicking himself, anyway, for agreeing to a night out without first running some reconnaissance. 

“Uh, I don’t really…” 

Daniel gestured for the bartender’s attention. 

“One more drink and it won’t matter.” 

Twenty minutes later, Carisi was all arms and legs on the dance floor, though his efforts were generously curbed by the density of the crowd. 

Gareth and Ian were off in their own worlds--wrapped tight though it was between their bodies and headspaces--but Daniel kept steadfast as a willing participant and unofficial ambassador. When they returned to the bar for another round

“Liar,” he teased as they downed half their respective beers. “You’ve got some moves.”

Carisi was grinning when he pulled back from the lip of his beer, lips wet, breath still catching up to him. 

“Raf tried to teach me to mambo, once. Literally once, it went so bad.” 

Feeling loose and exhilarated, Carisi went in for round two: dancing, drinking, and shouting couplets of conversation over pulsating music. It was wild, fun in ways Carisi was still only warming up to. He’d long known only a particular vein of excitement, and after police work, he’d only ever wanted to come down from those exaggerated, jagged highs with warm beer and bad TV, or hook ups with girls who’d have him sloppy. 

Letting loose had never entered the equation. Carisi knew cops who went that route only to find it short-serving for their needs. He thought of Amanda, who’d pulled herself out of that life, and wondered if he’d have the same fortitude to do the same.

Carisi smiled despite himself; one night out did not a problem make. 

Daniel elbowed Carisi at the bar. “You have an admirer, by the way.”

Carisi didn’t know what he was expecting in an explanation, but a drunk kid in his twenties who wanted Carisi to hoist him up on his shoulders so he could “be tall” was inexplicably _exactly_ what he wanted to hear.

“Yeah, well, I’m feeling generous. Point him out to me, huh?”

Downing the rest of his beer, Carisi thought he could get used to this. 

-

It was an hour later when everything changed. Carisi felt sick to his stomach and had a searing headache. He was three blocks out of the bar, coat still in hand, before the cold set in over his skin and he thought to put the thing on.

Carisi’s brain was a swell of stalled traffic converging after an accident. His thoughts were alight, drawn in bleating sounds and blinking lights enough to keep him distracted, but he found a way back home--to Barba--and there, he wondered what he’d have to expect. 

Would Barba be upset? Would he access his anger, kept though it was like a prized possession, spread piecemeal around the city, his office, the courtroom? Did he keep any in his home? Had Carisi ever seen it? Or had he absently pushed it aside--at Barba’s behest and delight, surely--and made space for softer feelings? Any fondness Barba had for Carisi, Carisi worried would turn like spoiled fruit. 

The doorman smiled and made mention of a couple of late nights, all around. Carisi tried to smile in return, but had no idea what spread over his face in the attempt. Happiness was a wrinkled sheen over terror, only. 

He’d seen _that much_ on Barba, before. 

Carisi arrived at Barba’s apartment door, hands dug deep into his coat pockets. His keys were cold against his knuckles; he hadn’t even thought to grip them. He had just as well supposed the door would be swung open with some intent, that Barba would have _some_ idea, and instead of entering all Carisi would find himself fit to do was to stoop and collect his things from an imagined heap in the hall. 

Carisi ran a hand over his face, his hair. He felt warm, despite hoofing it through the cold.

He knocked before making use of his key--a habit he'd taken up when Barba first moved in and still concerned himself with maintaining the explicit safety of his home. That, and securing his weapon, when he had it on him. Barba rolled his eyes at the continued effort, but Carisi knew he still wanted it done all the same.

The door opened without his effort towards that end, and Barba met him there--awake, if dressed as though he shouldn’t be in pajama bottoms and a white t-shirt. Likewise, his hair was laid flat on one side, further evidence that he’d recently been roused, and not waited up. 

Stood just a foot away, Carisi could smell scotch on Barba’s breath--not so much to suggest anything beyond a nightcap, but the evidence heaped itself in a pile. Carisi reasoned that Barba felt he'd merited rewarding himself for the tedium of yet another late night. 

“Raf. I’m sorry.”

“About today? Forget it.” Barba stepped aside, allowing Carisi through. Carisi hesitated only a moment before thundering past him, but stopping short all the same of pulling off his coat and shoes.

“No, not--” Carisi closed his eyes when Barba shut and locked the door--a thing Carisi should have thought to do. _Had done,_ quite often, which made this present oversight all the more egregious. “Not about today.”

“Okay,” Barba said, leaning with his back against the door. “So you want to argue more, then?” 

His left eyebrow and the corresponding corner of his mouth were raised just slightly; he was ready to pull the trigger on an amused turn, and if Carisi had anything to feed into it, they could go off like a shot, teasing and smiling and going to bed together. 

And that was no simple, easy thing. 

They’d both put effort towards that end, and to know such ease and camaraderie with another person always felt like a privilege it truly was.

As he considered losing that entirely, Carisi floundered.

“It’s just that--you know--sometimes you’re a lot to take--” 

Barba was no longer of the cusp of smiling and wanting; that possibility went careening over the set cliff of his brow, and shattered on the hardwood floors.

“By all means, don’t endure me.” 

Carisi was sickened by the suggestion. However idly made, it fell too close to what he supposed was his worst possible outcome. 

In a rush to act--to get out ahead of his own wrongdoing--Carisi's words did not come in order, but in their entirety. He gave a long-winded, erratic explanation of the bar, noting (rightly or wrongly) the invitation he’d extended to Barba. As his nerves overtook him, Carisi heard his own demise: an admission that he’d gone with new friends, but among them was the man he’d met earlier that day. While not entirely under circumstances of his choosing, he specified, he nonetheless felt as though he’d engaged in something that constituted a mistake, thoughtless and innocent in its making, but plain now in definition.

“...a date.”

“You mean, a second?” Barba drawled. 

Carisi looked near to tears. 

And in that moment, Barba understood more than he was seeing--or hearing--and in an shifty turn he was surprised to find himself making, he smiled. 

He’d heard an admission of guilt--the first in all his life, possibly, that he did not want to pursue. 

He dismissed it in a knee-jerk reaction. Twisted up in his creeping despair was a rush of forgiveness, unexpected and terrifying in its haste and frequency. 

“Look, it’s late, can this wait until tomorrow?”

But Carisi’s heart was too full, and its aching caused it to rock and back and forth, so when it eventually tipped and spilled out, they were both left to swim against its current. 

There was no allowing Barba the luxury of ignorance.

“Raf. I’m sorry.”

And, despite knowing nothing--but imaging it all--Barba felt forgiveness buoy him. In his most pragmatic mind, he knew it wouldn’t last. He would turn to it now to protect his softened heart, but at his core he would be swayed again to his natural state: bitterness, anger, and that final, empty end--resentment.

Barba gave a single shake of his head. He did not understand, and nor did he want to. 

They could still stop this, and forget, and go to bed. 

“I’ve never cheated on anybody,” Carisi said. He was red-faced with shame, and overwarm in his coat, though he imagined the fire he felt surging through his chest was the result of his heart breaking and its contents pouring out. 

“It’s not--I didn’t think I could do a thing like that, you know? If I loved somebody, how could I hurt them like that?”

Barba stared at him and asked only, “Are you being serious right now?”

Carisi didn’t answer him. He couldn’t. 

Twice in as many weeks, he’d drawn Barba into something only to tear the ground out from under his feet. 

Carisi didn’t know how he’d managed it.

Worse, he didn’t know how a man could stand it.  
Terrified, he didn’t think a man would. 

Carisi’s headache subsided, and he was alone to feel the full weight of his nausea, sadness, and shame. Like any good Catholic, he allowed himself time to suffer, and let the matter lay like a beached whale--bloating, stinking, stirring discontent with every passing minute. 

Carisi got as far as three. He could not bring himself to answer for what he’d done, to explain how little thought he’d put into it, how in the midst of simple delight, foolishness found him, wound him up, and set him adrift. 

He could not say those things to the drawn expression on Barba’s face, and see it go further into stillness. He could not will himself to bear witness to the emotional fallout.

And while Carisi was all but beside himself with regret, and quaking under the weight of his own revelation, Barba was quiet and contemplative. His feelings were still sussing themselves out, then taking sides. Along with hurt and betrayed, he was a little intimidated, of all things.

How easily had someone come between them, and turned Carisi to their side, if only for a night? For an hour? A second? How loose was Barba’s grasp on their relationship that it could slip so far? How blind was his gaze that had not seen this coming? 

How had he not prepared himself for the inevitable hurt?

He liked to pretend he wouldn’t mind, that he was well and high above all petty concerns about morality as it pertained to monogamy. Dating like he used to, Barba hadn’t practiced it. Couldn’t possibly, with a standing weekday affair with a professor, and various trysts with men whose eyes were as deep as their fathers’ pockets. 

But he’d grown out of that--or grown from it, rather. And the routine and familiarity of a grounded partnership found him well. 

He just prefered it, was all. 

_It's neater._

He’d said as much for a lot of things.

Barba shifted where he stood. Still upright and endlessly rigid, it seemed more likely a thing that the earth had quaked beneath him. He folded his arms across his chest, but the effort got muddled, and he looked closer to holding himself. 

“What do you want to do?” And because he felt stupid for asking--stupid for the uncertainty loaded over his words and spilling out his lips--Barba added spitefully, “What do you even want with _me?”_

The change was swift and damning. Without the cover of doubt, without Carisi’s glowing good nature to depend on, Barba felt menaced by this choice. It was made somewhere out in the City, behind his back and yet well into the open. And the--

_Consequences._

Barba’s mind was a rush of scenarios, each worse than the last: smiling for Benson, keeping his composure, and accepting the blame that would cast left out the eyes of others when people inevitably learned of the discord, assuming naturally that the caustic ADA was at fault.

Barba didn’t see himself saying otherwise. 

The thoughts dispersed, shaken by the heavy beating of Barba’s heart, which advanced like an army. 

When faced with a threat greater than his capacity to tackle it, Barba’s first instinct was nevertheless to go on the attack, to put down and muffle Carisi’s voice so that--possibly--Barba wouldn’t be hurt by it. He did this with acid on his tongue and teeth cut more like a snarl than not. His best and worst attributes were one in the same--Barba was always up for a fight. 

“Everything,” Carisi answered at once. It was reminiscent of an answer Barba once gave in quiet desperation as he faced losing everything. Upon hearing its use, Barba now saw the response as weak and infuriating. 

A nothing-answer. 

A diversion. 

“Anything,” Carisi said, now a plea. “Whatever you’ll give me, now that I’ve fucked up.”

Barba was silent, and in his expression bore every semblance of contemplation. 

This relieved Carisi, who had seen Barba wronged, and had anticipated outright fury. 

“How--precisely?” 

Barba hated that he was looking for a way into his anger, that he could not otherwise access it freely. It seemed too pedestrian a thing for him to do--to beg to be insulted with every slimy detail, all so that something might stir in him with which he could act on or act out. He reached for--and fell short of--something greater than remorse. 

When Carisi hesitated, Barba wanted to demand it of him.

_Tell me what should I be upset about, and to what grim degree._

Instead, he said only, “I don’t care about the why.”

This, because perhaps there was a deal to be made for his ego, even if he was to surrender the whole of his heart. Barba shot a glare back at his bedroom. He supposed it was too late to change, though having this conversation in socked feet and a t-shirt seemed especially unfair. 

Carisi seemed to shrink in the tale’s telling. 

“I just wanted to have fun,” he said meekly. “And dancing was fun--”

“You danced?” Barba asked, now inexplicably sore that his own gallant efforts had been swept up into this ordeal.

“And it all happened so fast--” 

Finally, Barba could not take it. The wispy bits of explanation, the hesitation that carried them like sprouted dandelion seeds. In exchange for his pride--a shining, glorious prize Barba learned he truly was willing to sacrifice--Barba did not want a wafting, gentle word. He wanted answers. 

“What,” he snapped, imagining the pace, every forward step a deliberate choice. “Walking six blocks, catching the subway, going to his four-story walkup--all that escaped your notice?”

Carisi had the gall to look offended. “I didn’t go home with him.”

Barba’s heart sank through the floor. 

“You… went to your place?”

“No.”

“A hotel?”

_“No.”_

Barba felt sick. _This,_ from a sweet-face detective who hadn't fucked a man until Barba gave him the pleasure? 

“At the bar?”

“In the bathroom,” Carisi muttered, and gave the rest of his answer to a scuff mark on the floor. “We both went to take a piss, we were washing our hands--and he kissed me.” Carisi remembered Daniel’s hand was still wet and soapy when it came to cradle his cheek.

Barba cocked his head. He was still--progressively--dumbfounded.

“You kissed.”

“He kissed me.”

“You just kissed.”

“And I backed up--hit my head on a paper towel dispenser, it still _really hurts_ \--and left.” Carisi lifted his gaze momentarily to find Barba’s, but couldn't sustain itself there. It fell to the floor again, and bore a hole into which it intended to bury itself. “But it happened and I’m sorry.”

“You danced,” Barba reiterated, as if the story--even in its complete simplicity--still escaped the confines of reason. “And you kissed. _Were_ kissed.” 

“I only want to kiss and dance with you,” Carisi said--last words, spoken as if for posterity. 

“Oh, don’t-- _don’t trot out some cute line._ I’d like to think we’re both better than _that.”_

But Barba was only stalling, himself. 

Even for as much or as little as Carisi told him, Barba felt hounded by details. More than anything, he was taken aback by the shock he'd endured--that he hadn’t mentally prepared himself for this, and was _enduring_ anything at all. 

Nevermind undue--Carisi's sin no more met the biblical level of his admission than it stood a chance of being reflected in the good book itself. _Getting tipsy and sharing a kiss in the most unromantic of scenes, before running home to own up to the deed?_ Barba guessed it could float around the sections on transubstantiation, if anything. 

But the admission was its own calamitous adventure. 

Barba was hurt by the very prospect of a betrayal. And at the very cusp of the truth, where everything hung in perpetual limbo between a _misdeed_ and _ignorance of one,_ he learned his first instinct was not to fight, but to flee from reality, to take to bed and curl up with what it was he wanted to keep.

His pride, it seemed, could no longer keep him warm at night. 

_“First,”_ Barba started, and already he felt the thrumming introduction of a headache at the backs of his eyes, “ _All that_ did not deserve _all this._ ” 

Barba waved a hand, indicating everything and sparing nothing. The theatrics, the red-rimmed eyes, the shaking voice, the croak gasping out every time Carisi closed his lips to another _sorry._

And those awful, heinous, _Raf, I’m sorry’_ s. Barba hated each utterance more than the last. 

“And that is not the face of someone who stepped a toe out of line, okay? Dial it back.” 

Barba grimaced when he heard his own voice--still strained, still high. He dropped it, let it scuttle across the floor as he smoothed a hand over his hair and another thrust another in Carisi’s face. His fingers were alternatively bent, pinched, and erect as they searched for the best shape to convey the search for clarity in which Barba was currently lost.

 _“Furthermore,”_ Barba started, and now found himself pacing the room like he might play a courtroom. “Save the midnight confessions for priests, okay? Because I’ve heard worse.” 

Barba pinched the bridge of his nose. As his panic receded he felt nothing in the interim. The effect was dizzying in its intensity.

“You didn’t--well. You didn’t cheat?” Barba felt compelled to phrase it as a question, though Carisi had committed the notion to fact. He supposed Carisi _would_ think that. Whether he’d initiated the contact or not, he was there. He colluded in creating a moment. He was at fault. 

It was that Catholic upbringing, Barba supposed, and a dedication to those ideals that persisted like a cold. For his sexual curiosity, harsher, more principled penalties were his due. It did not help that Carisi’s sense of morality was not Barba’s, and Barba now felt a fool for overreacting to what was--itself--an overreaction. He took a breath, let it level out the pitch in his voice like cool waters rising to a tide. 

“But you went on a date,” Barba reasoned, though vindication for his earlier accusation was hardly the reward he’d expected it to be. He found himself almost smiling at the absurdity. 

“Table that.”

Barba went from feeling terrified to feeling relieved to feeling spiteful. Here were the ills he foretold, spelled out in his favor, yet written in mud. 

When a flash of resentment found him, Barba indulged. His silver tongue kissed the backs of his teeth as he rendered his most icy conclusion: “Won’t your family be pleased.”

And whether the drinks were to blame, or the dancing, or the fraying ends of his nerves sparking into a blazing inferno, Carisi went off.

“Oh, _fuck off with that!_ I did this for you!”

His raised voice and irate tone dropped like concrete at Barba’s feet. 

Barba picked them up and hurled them right back. He joined the effort with a scowl so set in his features, though, it seemed there was no moving it from between his brows and his fold of his arms across his chest. It was framed, a gallery piece for the ages. Carisi thought he could look on it for an eternity and never know it to change.

_“Come again?”_

He spat the words like venom, and Carisi backpedaled immediately. He did this honestly and earnestly, but Barba was partial to neither approach at the moment. 

“I thought if I just--if I met these people, and proved to my family nothing else was gonna click, that it’s you and it’s me, and that’s _it,_ they’d get the message. And they’d be kinder to you.”

Unmoved from his spot, Barba stretched an arm to his left towards the long table against the wall leading from his apartment door, which was littered with mail, loose change, a pair of gloves, and a pen atop a pad of paper. Without blinking or casting an eye towards their positioning, he fetched the latter two items and held them to out for Carisi to accept.

“I’m going to need a _diagram_ as to how improving your dating prospects is going to stop your aunt from staring death into my heart.”

“That’s just her face now! Can you stop! She’s sensitive about it.”

Anger held, a crackle in the air like electricity. Barba felt they’d both been burned. 

Barba pursed his lips, closed his eyes, and shook his head. 

“Are you bored?” 

_“No.”_

“Because I can deal with that,” Barba said. Though it was not his intention, the certainty in his voice somehow eased Carisi’s fears. “Or do something about it. I don’t know.”

They both appreciated a moment of silence--to settle, to strategize. Barba had it in him to forgive Carisi--easily. He practiced the words until they arrived in his mind, simple and stirring as a breeze, but still he could not seem to say them in Carisi’s presence.

“I’m not bored with you,” Carisi said into the silence. He looked at the floor, still monumentally disappointed in himself and unwilling to let Barba end the conversation for expediency's sake. “I love you.”

“And I appreciate the _abundance_ of clarity you offer that sentiment,” Barba said, his tongue still forked and spitting.

“I’m sorry, Raf.” Carisi sounded disheartened, as if he'd lost faith in his own reasoning. “Please don’t…” 

Carisi didn’t want to so much as put the words into being, to give them even a half-life on his own voice. _Make me leave._

“No,” Barba sighed, a quiet dismissal of Carisi’s worst fears. 

_Never that._

But there remained the matter of what he _would_ say, given that such was the set-up--misdeeds had been aired, arguments were presented, and being the offended party, the verdict was Barba’s to render. 

“I’m going to cancel our plans tomorrow,” he said.

“Plans?” Carisi asked, then sank in further dismay. “Oh, God. Your mom. Dinner with your mom. Please don’t cancel. I can--”

“Carisi,” Barba chastised, and Carisi heard fondness there, amidst humor and annoyance and sleep-deprivation. “Please. I’m not showing you to her like this.”

Privately, Barba was relieved. Though his mother had made purposeful gains in her ability to see her son plainly--and to entertain, if not always outright accept, his whole self--Barba still felt inclined to play moderator at their dinners, rare though they were. He guided the conversation out of potholes and kept the meal from lingering, or the alcohol from flowing too liberally. That much was new territory for Barba, who had to steady his hand literally, rather than with a drink.

It was just as well that he would not have Carisi to concern himself with, because Barba very much _needed that drink._

Barba tugged Carisi up from the couch, hand slowly running from the man’s wrist to his elbow, then back again. In a quiet turn fueled as much by the late hour as his softened heart, Barba raised the captive hand to his own cheek, and turned to meet it with a soft brush of his lips.

Into the soft flesh, Barba promised things were okay, Carisi had done nothing unforgivable, and he’d better see that for himself in the morning. Barba told him to go home, go to sleep, and feel better.

Carisi did not move to go or tempt fate by positioning himself any closer to Barba’s favor. He simply stood, head lowered, attention lost on the hold Barba had on him. His hand and otherwise.

When Barba finally pulled away, he heard himself bubble with a curious little laugh--absurd, given the wrenching look on his partner’s face, but a genuine response all the same. It was surely born of the electric shock given to his nerves, and the plummeting descent they took with Carisi's explanation. All the same, it ended on a sideways smile, clipped on one end and raised like a toast on the other. 

“Go home,” Barba repeated. “We’ll talk again later.” 

“Can’t I stay here?”

Barba knew he had to draw a line with himself, more so than Carisi. 

“I think you want to go home.” 

“And you want me to go.”

“I can send you with a bagged lunch and a note pinned to your jacket if that would make things any clearer.”

The response broke sharper than Barba intended. He shook his head after it, but stepped not an inch away from his request. 

“Carisi. Please. Everything’s fine.” 

-

Lucia Barba still lived in the Bronx. 

No longer on Jerome Avenue, certainly--she’d left the projects behind, same as her son. She’d gone even further, once--Barba had convinced her to move to Manhattan, and helped foot the bill because-- _finally_ \--he could. She only lasted six months surrounded by health food stores and boutiques and a park. It wasn’t for her, she insisted, even up to the point that Barba knew that fight was lost, as he was carrying boxes back up to her old Bronx apartment. This was her home, her community, and though she denied it, Barba’s mother harbored an indisputable touch of sentimentality about her choice not to escape to Manhattan. 

There was more of her mother in her than Lucia would care to admit. 

What with her responsibilities to her charter school, she claimed it was a matter of pride and practicality, though Barba suspected more of the former than the latter.

Over dinner in her polished little apartment, Barba told Lucia about meeting Carisi’s family--and all the gorey details therein--before finishing with the kiss, tacking it on at the end, as if it was a mere afterthought.

“So that was last weekend, and just yesterday there was… an incident. Not to overstate things, but he had a good time at some bar downtown, and I… was uptown.” 

Lucia carefully tabled her knife and fork, then took up her glass of wine. 

“Burying the lede, are we?”

Barba rolled his eyes and reclined in his seat, a dismissal of their quiet meal and any pretense of returning to it. He was wearing grey slacks, navy suspenders, and a lavender dress shirt. He hadn’t gone into the office that day--had hardly so much as left the couch, where he’d sat, pensive, for hours on end--so the rolled sleeves and casual disheveledness was really only a costume he’d worn for himself, his mother, and the taxi driver. 

It was with purpose, of course. Barba could not very well stand before his mother in sweats and a t-shirt, have this conversation, and assume she wouldn’t put him on suicide watch, after. So he only looked the part of her accomplished son, though he’d wondered at length all day if that should be his focus, now. Happiness was a fleeting thing, and he’d had the lion’s share in recent months. Where had he last spotted his goals, when Carisi made for such a welcome distraction? 

He took up his own drink--scotch--and took a sip. It was answer enough. 

“We’re fine,” he prefaced, and considered the woman sat across from him--lovely, still, and strong as he’d ever known her. The hard look in her eye was no longer a tell. She always wondered after him, after his smiles and assurances. They were unchanged since his childhood, worn seconds before his father started in one him, and put on again after the man was done. 

_I’m fine,_ he’d said, at eleven, with a dishrag stuffed under his bloody nose. 

Always fine. She could scarcely remember a time when he was to be believed.

He asked her, “What would you have done?” 

Then, thinking on more than one occasion in his childhood when his parents’ fighting--over tempers, money, fidelity, and Barba himself--proved impossible to ignore, Barba added, “Or, what did you do?” 

Lucia was unnerved by the phrasing, and made that much clear: “Mi hijo, if this relationship is anything like mine and your father’s--”

“No, of course not,” Barba interrupted. He felt strangely sated by the concern rising in her voice. It was an admission she’d never entirely given him, and rebuked his anger for. Her fear, her pain--she never wanted it to stack up in opposition to her son’s own father, and whatever relationship there (imagined or otherwise) she sought to preserve. Barba could never fathom why she did not accept that he was resolutely on the side of righteousness, on _her side._

“And he’d be you in this scenario, anyway.”

“Me?” Lucia’s surprise stirred Barba’s own, who hadn’t realized the extent of what he’d said.

“Just. _Better.”_

He drowned his stupidity in a glass of the scotch _he’d brought,_ and when he came up for air managed to shake his head and smile weakly. 

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he said, and left his meaning absent. Carisi or his parents’ turbulent relationship--none of it needed speaking on, if the subject proved too vast. It felt--at times--like describing the ocean while stranded in its infinite depths. The prerogative was to keep one’s head above water, not to philosophize about the particular shades of blue while drowning. 

And Lucia Barba was head and shoulders above the water’s surface.

“Please. What else is there to talk about?” Lucia toasted him with her half-empty glass. “My son has a love life. I never thought I’d see the day.”

Barba rolled his eyes, but remained quiet. He awaited her line of questioning, or opening statement, or collected work of ills. He knew--ostensibly--that he was opening himself to her motherly consternation, to her love, which cut itself just this side of cruel. 

Barba didn’t soften his read of her antics, and knew this much else about them: they were very much his own. 

Ashamedly, he believed she might even pounce with delight on the matter. She might even raise her chin and slit her eyes as dawning satisfaction took hold and assured her she’d been right all along, and here in particular: Barba’s choices were poorly made, foolish, and grounded in meaningless assurances.

 _Love,_ he’d said. Insisted, really, in the face of her bargaining and doubt. Why _this,_ when he could find a nice woman? Why _Carisi,_ when convention could smooth his way in the world? Why deny it now, when he’d longed and strived for only that? 

Realizing he was making all the arguments for her, Barba returned to his scotch.

There was a streak of self-intended cruelness there, too. Barba wanted the vindication of decades of silence on his part--he wanted his mother to sneer at his pain, proving that her efforts now were all an act, and she could only ever _play_ at good-intentioned. 

He wanted every reason to wall himself off from prying eyes. 

“Hm,” she started, and to Barba’s ear sounded genuinely thoughtful. 

He quickly learned that _thoughtful_ wasn’t quite the same as _considerate._

“Might as well start with the obvious--did you agree to be monogamous?”

Barba felt his stomach turn. This was not a conversation he’d ever envisioned having with his mother, no matter the terms. She could inch closer to his side all the while, and still, he’d never knowingly seek this exchange. 

“Mami,” he said--a warning. But same as her wine, she raised an eyebrow, and soon a finger, and Barba knew her voice was next. 

He had to answer her.

“We are. And--it’s implied.”

“Ah, but--”

“Please. I have met him.” 

“I’m only saying. Some men, particularly gay men--”

“It’s not like that,” Barba insisted, wishing he had it in him to say more to dispute the point. He wasn’t up for that fight, those particulars. And truthfully, he did not want to advise himself of the whole of her perspective, if it should hurt him.

Barba took another gulp of scotch. He was going soft. 

“Maybe it is?” Lucia said, the notion entirely self-contained and deadly simple. “Maybe he’s an ambivalent young boy. Weren’t you one, once?”

Barba could not be certain if his mother _knew_ how true that was, or if she had only turned up lucky with a pointed guess. He narrowed his eyes after her speculation all the same.

“I was, he’s not,” he said, and took a bite of his meal in the hopes that she might follow, and together they could force some unwitting silence on themselves. 

The men he’d alluded to at Harvard was Barba’s safest bet. He’d stopped talking about anyone he was seeing after that, and chose not to press on whether Lucia thought he was dutifully sleeping with only women instead, or miserably abstinent. No matter their friendship, she was still his mother, and those were his truths before they were her ammunition in an argument. 

Barba watched her for a moment, and soon saw her game. She didn’t return to her meal; she was preparing to make a feast of her son.

He shoved his plate away for a second time. 

“Mami. I thought you liked him?”

“I do,” she answered, though Barba heard it for little more than a placating measure. He remained suspect of her deceptively simple reasoning. “But apparently I understand men better than you do.” 

They continued like that, occasionally drinking only to stifle sharper words. 

Barba realized how deeply he was sunk when he found himself arguing over the merits of intimacy and honesty with his _mother._ He lamented his dwindling pool of friends, most of whom he knew from work or Brooklyn, and he had no intention of bringing his personal ills into the courthouse, much less making the trip into another borough if he could not even have the assurance afforded by distance. ADAs _talked,_ mercilessly. Barba knew this from his own damn self. 

But who else was there? It would be cruel to turn to Benson, because as much as he valued her judgment, he could not throw Carisi into that light. She was his superior, and to make him an object of discussion was conceivable as nothing _but_ a bad idea. 

So he shortened his sights to across the dining table, and made do.

“He’s so sorry. It’s embarrassing,”

“Charming.”

“No,” Barba insisted. “I am not charmed.”

“Then you’re mad.”

“I’m not,” Barba said, and shrank some into his own admission. It was strangely roomy--a statement seemingly without end, and from which he found countless examples: he wasn’t mad, or jealous, or even particularly vindictive after the fact. He searched for what it was that stood aside, alone, and glowed warm with recognition. 

“I’m… relieved, on the one hand, that I did not plant this affliction in his head.”

Lucia’s brows disappeared under her bangs. “Affliction, hm? I remember there was a time you once told me not to use that word.” 

Barba closed his eyes, just for a moment. Well before entertaining this conversation with his mother, he’d felt scattered and not at all like himself. He let too much slip out of his iron grip and come into view of others; such foibles were very much unlike him. 

“I mean it differently,” he said, a poor excuse if ever he’d given one. 

Lucia folded her arms ahead of her, and leaned forward over the table, as if she--or Barba himself--thought there was any escaping her scrutinizing gaze.

“You mean to sound like you’ve created something and it’s turned on you. You give yourself too much credit--you’re no Dr. Frankenstein.”

Barba could have smiled--he was certain there was a compliment to be found in all that psychoanalyzing. 

_Goddamnit._ Barba realized he had a session with his therapist in just two weeks’ time. If he could have only waited, and saved his heartfelt unrest for an impartial ear, perhaps he wouldn’t have let his tongue betray him those simple truths: he had reservations where he denied them. He had doubts where he flaunted every assurance. 

“I’m more concerned with his family issues than with last night’s… minor infraction.”

“He’s not going to turn his back on them,” Lucia said, and regarded her son with a long, unwavering stare. “Unlike some people.”

Barba had neither the desire nor the standing to deny it. 

“I don’t have the time or the patience to make a case for myself, even to family. I’m not desperate for them to love me. I don’t need them to.” 

He was getting good in his explanation--it was succinct, morally grey, and conspicuously tidy. He supposed it got enough workshopping on Carisi.

“You must have gone simple-minded with love, if you think that’s a viable plan,” Lucia tutted. She leaned across the table, leading with her wine. “No one is like you, no one can turn their hearts off to others as a matter of _pride._ Their doubt will find him. He’s a sweet boy, but weak-willed.” 

“If you’re trying to defend me, Mami, please understand that I’m not offended.” Barba let his gaze find hers, and rest there, until his meaning was understood. His behaviors weren’t Carisi’s, and the younger man could not be shunned for refusing to adopt Barba’s tactics as his own. 

“He’s… adamant. About us.” Barba dropped his stare to the table, hoping to lose it amongst the glasses, silverware, and plates. It was drawn to his glass of amber scotch, which Barba drained. 

On that sour kiss off, Barba let rip a quiet truth, hidden in a deeply concerted effort, but free now: “But I’d kind of anticipated this.”

Her eyes widened, then set themselves like headlights on her son, who found himself stilled, silenced, and outright stupefied by an unintended--but uncontrollable--rush of appreciation for her authority. 

The realization found Lucia’s eyes first, then her lips: “You were his _first.”_

With his mouth slightly agape, Barba’s denials found better prospects to drop in heavy, indelicate heaps. “Mami--I--I did not say that.”

“Ai, mi hijo.”

“I did not say that, I did not say anything--anything to that effect.” Barba waded up his cloth napkin and discarded it. Like the earrings dangling from his mother’s ears, the scarf thrown over her coat on the rack by the door, the napkin set was another gift from him. There were fragments of him all over her apartment, yet it was his words he wanted to chase out the door. “This is merely conjecture. You're reading into things.”

“Because it’s there in black and white across your face,” she said, all but laughing at him. “Rafi, Rafi, Rafi.” 

“Mami,” Barba warned, though he doubted he commanded any clout, red-faced and sputtering. “Eso es suficiente.”

“Please. This never happens. Let me enjoy it.”

“Enjoy my emotional turmoil?” 

Enjoy it, _nothing._ Lucia was going to _revel_ in it.

“He’s young, he’s cute, he’s curious…” Lucia ticked one after another from some curated mental list, like it was obvious, like those were the facts and they spelled out only one natural conclusion. “I mean, I know you’ve lost weight, but…” 

She met Barba with a face to suggest the _rest of it_ \--the horrible working hours, the prissy attitude, the years pushing on--still stood. And, perhaps now more than ever, those reasons anchored her argument towards their sharing. Her son needn’t be all those things, and if love didn’t soften him, or at least make him any less the belligerent hardass he was, maybe love wasn’t the answer.

“Love the honesty, Mami. Really.” Barba gave a withering shake of his head. “Anyway, no. He adores me.”

Realizing, of course, that he sounded like a damn fool, Barba stood from the table and gathered their plates. He brought them both to the sink and ran the water, preparing to wash them by hand. Both he and Lucia had machines in their apartment, but after living entire lives without the device, simply could never get into the habit. 

_Luxury is life’s most dangerous habit._

Barba remembered when Lucia first told him that. He was young, just one year into Harvard, and calling her from the common area of his dorm building. It was late, and although there was no one around, he spoke in Spanish to better mask his thoughts on the place, which he spilled like state secrets. 

He’d just finished a story about his wealthy classmates, never quite certain why every wild tale left a sour taste in his mouth. 

Lucia, of course, had the answer.

 _You’re right to be wary,_ she’d said next, and Barba still felt compelled to roll his eyes at this part, which he saw as a function of her old-school Catholicism, and little else. 

_Getting what you want? Mi hijo, that’s certain death._

Then again--there was longevity to be found in any system that promised a golden eternity but preyed on slippages in self-restraint. 

Barba rolled his shirtsleeves to rest just below his elbows, and got his hands dirty.

“I should want to end things,” he said, and didn’t look at his mother while doing so. “I should know that one thing leads to another, and it is _because_ I know that, I should willingly step aside, and let it happen as it would. Otherwise, I subject myself to… a contest.” He scrubbed aggressively at a plate all the while, then let it sink into the muddied water as he set his hands defiantly on the countertop--arms rigid, fingers tempted to tap a nervous beat. “I should be too proud. Shouldn’t I?”

 _Doubt_ was at once a terribly banal and completely mortifying foe. It neither flourished nor died, only fed--greedily or piecemeal, but always. 

Barba looked up, finally, and was found at once by his mother’s stare.

Lucia knew there was not a breath of assurance in her son’s statement, but if she was disappointed in that fact, she did not let it show. She very nearly wanted to smile, instead, at the familiar memory of Barba sussing out his emotions as a child. She’d seen a whole host of things flash behind her child’s bright eyes as he tried to understand himself. It often frustrated him, guessing at what he wanted because he felt nothing like anger, but something worse. 

_Shame,_ she realized, in retrospect. 

As if he’d heard her very thoughts, Barba shook his head, then returned to the dishes.

“I can hold a grudge, I know. Better than most anything I can do, or claim, or attribute to myself, I hold an _exquisite_ grudge.” 

In an attempt to match his hands’ work with that of his mouth, Barba washed and re-washed silver utensils and glasses. He kept talking, more in search of some inevitable conclusion, if not answers.

“But. I forgive him. I genuinely…” The fact still astounded him; Barba usually jumped at the chance to frame his life in arguments, and yet here he had no such desire. “I’m not upset. He’s upset enough for the both of us.” 

Barba fell silent. The admission--true though it was, after much consideration--still felt lacking. Barba felt _something._

And who better than his mother to know exactly what was in his heart, and playing over his face, obvious to all but himself?

“You were blindsided. And that embarrasses you.” Lucia topped off her own glass of wine, and took a healthy swig before continuing. These realities, stark as they’d become since Barba had let her see him--no, since _she_ had let herself see him--still found her as misshapen. Weight and depth lodged themselves at opposite ends, and lightness did not find itself readily available in his smile or his eyes. He had to dig deep for those things.

Lucia did not always have the best understanding of where Barba stored all parts of himself. He put his heart and soul into his work, so what else was left to fill the void?

It was joy. And though it still confounded her, she believed her son when he said a dimpled, blue-eyed boy from Staten Island gave him exactly that.

“And because you love him, you forgive him. You’re willing to sacrifice your pride for him.” 

She frowned, then, thinking that explanation came far too easily. The words--she knew them first in Spanish, and supposed that meant her mother had once said them to her. Lucia's heart ached with an old, familiar hurt as her mother's memory consumed her thoughts. By the look at Barba's face, a sweet-faced visage of his beloved abuelita commanded his attention, too.

“I don’t know if I raised you that way, or if we came to those conclusions independently,” Lucia told him--another borrowed saying. 

Barba let his sopping wet hands rest on either side of the sink. He’d always worried about becoming his father. Now, he had a sinking terror that--in this respect--he was becoming his mother. Someone who loved despite her better judgment, and someone for whom that choice did not pay off.

Barba cleared his throat.

“Yes. Well. It’s something to consider.”

Lucia threw up her free hand and joined Barba at her kitchen counter. 

“ _Please._ You wouldn’t bother asking my opinion if you weren’t already of a mind to stay with him. You want me to be the contrarian.”

Barba smiled at her brashness. 

“I’ve never wanted to fight you on who I’m seeing.” 

He spoke quietly, almost regrettably, for all those years he managed to do nothing but precisely the opposite. All of Carisi’s efforts of late--however poorly they played out--made Barba realize he’d hardly tried at all.

Barba lowered his head and avoided her gaze, but found cause in doing so as he searched for a dishtowel with which to dry his hands. He found one with silhouettes of whiskered catfish printed on it--a gaudy gift, no doubt, from family in Miami.

“I wanted your blessing. I used to think I could argue it out of you.” 

Sharing that fact was almost as precious as the idea itself, and Barba bristled at his own guilelessness. He tossed the towel on the counter and shelved his hand on his hip, then sent a warning look in his mother’s direction. 

“Before you bite my head off, _yes,_ that’s the therapy talking. And please don’t ask me how much that sentence cost, I’m already having Kind of A Day.” 

Lucia huffed a soft laugh. In the breath that came after, she found her smart remark had gone, if not escaped her entirely. She rose her from the table to join her son at in the kitchen, taking steps as if she thought she could walk back into her voice. 

She searched for whatever cruel thing had found her, and on a lark wondered after a kind word--could she pluck one out of thin air? Was it possible? Believable, even, from her son who questioned her the same as she questioned him? 

What she said instead, with her hand raised to cup her son’s cheek, could have been taken for either.

“My sweet, sweet boy.”

She watched with particular interest all the idiosyncrasies that pinched and tugged and paraded over her son’s face. The line between his brows drawing low as he questioned her word choice. The narrowing of his eyes at her sudden proximity. 

The twitch in his cheek from an old wound. 

The smile he gave her by default. 

All of it was assured, even the genuine surprise touching the tops of his brows. She’d seen it a million times, in identical servings, answering back at her when Barba fed her bold faced lies or niceties that might as well share the name. 

She’d uncovered nothing. 

“Well. I hope I told you what you wanted to hear.”

She patted his cheek and left it at that.

-

When Barba returned to his apartment, Carisi was there.

Still warmed by his meal and the scotch--if not the conversation that went along with it--Barba found himself more or less receptive to Carisi’s presence. He knew they’d talk again, and supposed there was little cause for waiting.

“Hi.”

Carisi was sat on Barba’s couch, drinking a beer. Quite liking the picture that made, Barba got a beer for himself, and slowly made his place on the opposite recliner. 

Barba pushed away mounting thoughts that he’d hoped Carisi would be here, expected it, and wouldn’t have known what to do if the man hadn’t showed. 

With hooded eyes and sunken shoulders, Carisi looked as though he hadn’t slept since they last spoke. He’d showered and changed, however, opting for a sweater Barba had once complimented in passing. Barba didn’t feel so full of himself for thinking Carisi might remember that; the man had an ear for kindness, and never forgot its sharing. Barba wondered if that was his fault--if his heart was increasingly hollow, and Carisi had to mine for what precious pieces were left exposed.

When Barba thought on it, the whole process seemed incredibly laborious. 

So Barba thought instead, _I’ll kiss him._

_He’ll smile._

_We’ll forget._

And when this happens again, he thought, he won't be surprised. He’d know then what he should have done, now.

“I went to a clinic.”

The words were out before Barba had so much as sipped from his beer--much less made his move--so when the man’s heart sank, it didn’t find relief in buoyancy. 

Carisi had lied. He’d done more than just kiss, and he hadn’t been safe. Barba felt a rush of terror and--disappointingly--satisfaction. He’d been right all along. 

Head still bowed, Carisi continued: “I had my urine tested. I mean--I thought, I _hoped--”_

Barba dropped his head into his free hand, and imagined he’d aged three years in three seconds.

“You thought you were drugged?” Barba said, and felt close to cracking apart. He looked at Carisi, who wore certitude like a second skin.

“It would explain _everything.”_

 _Fuck kindness,_ Barba thought. _This man needs a lesson in prose._

“I say this with the utmost love and care: you're a fucking idiot.”

Finally, Barba took a swig of his beer. It was pleasantly chilled, but he was no nearer to sated than if he'd already had a dozen. “So. What’s the diagnosis? Tequila?”

Carisi rolled his eyes at the joke, but had nothing to add to his point. It stood as he’d presented it: without confidence.

“I’m sorry you weren’t roofied?” Barba jeered. “Better luck next time?” In an attempt to mask his relief, Barba fast turned his unease into poor humor. “Do they make a Hallmark Card for that?” 

“It was nice,” Carisi said lowly--a confession, Barba realized. One he’d asked for, but dreaded hearing. Carisi, too, was beset by the dawning reality of his own admission. This was the cause for his theatrics--not that he’d gone and done anything out of line, but that he’d felt something when even the smallest of events happened for him all the same. 

“It felt nice. For all of a second. And that freaked me out.” Carisi said this much not to be cruel, but in the vain hope that unearthing truth from doubt would let Barba hate him more clearly, and then reason himself from it. 

Though, Carisi would be lying to himself if he thought he didn’t wallow in self-pity, some.

“I thought I was better than that.”

And again, Barba wanted to kiss him. He set his beer on the coffee table and took Carisi’s hand, instead. 

Along the soft flesh of Carisi’s palm, Barba rubbed slow circles with his thumb. 

“Listen, stupid.” It seemed a fitting-enough start. “I believe you when you say you’re sorry. And,” Barba rolled his eyes because it felt fitting, “It’s okay. I have no illusions that this was some grand affair.” 

Barba turned Carisi’s hand over in his own, tracing the sloping knuckles and long, graceful digits. These were hands that knew him intimately, and that alone was a strange commodity. 

“There are… extenuating circumstances, here. Don’t you think?” 

Carisi stared ahead blankly--perhaps not hearing him, or else not understanding.

“I wouldn’t forgive me.”

Thinking his winning argument was just a breath away, Barba smirked and asked pointedly: “Would you forgive me?”

“I--” At Carisi’s hesitation, the expression on Barba’s face fell away, and he went from smug to surprised in two seconds flat. 

“I don’t know,” Carisi said. No hypothetical could be worse than his own present reality, however, and Carisi quickly succumbed to its particulars. “I can’t figure out why I did that. Why I didn’t think about you or us or _everything._ ” 

“Thanks,” Barba hummed. Then, in a bid to satisfy the cosmos’s need for shared ills, Barba found himself again considering those few, dangerous conclusions he’d started towards while pickled in scotch and scalding under the limelight cast by his mother’s attention. He released Carisi’s hand and brought both to rest on his own knees, and steadied himself with this and a slow breath.

 _Sweet, sweet boy,_ he thought, and knew himself to be wholly undeserving of the title.

“Carisi… maybe this is very simple.”

Barba hadn’t planned to go this route; in fact, he’d patently wanted to ignore this very possibility. The thoughts he’d shared with his mother--or merely hinted at, besides--were only that. Thoughts, hypotheticals, what-ifs. His only desire was for the weekend to pass and the week to find him better, and Carisi kinder, and together they’d delicately skirt the matter, and eventually time would swallow it up whole. 

But seeing Carisi’s anguished face--his tightly drawn brows, a mouth that set itself on a level line, cheeks that found no relief from yet another disappointment uncovered from deep within himself--Barba knew he had no choice.

Perhaps it was something in Barba’s tone that first tipped Carisi off. This, rather than the terms that lingered and raised explanations like domino pieces, readying to fall. Carisi could see it coming down the pike, and went on the offensive.

“I know you’re mad at me. You should be mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

Barba had long-known Carisi to be a little rough, a little messy. A little new to all of this. 

He studied the man just a moment all the same, to remind himself that he loved all of those things.

“Maybe you deserve some time to explore, to see what else is out there.” Barba was impressed with himself--despite feeling sick to his stomach at the very prospect, the suggestion somehow sounded magnanimous. “You’re wondering about it, certainly. That’s how it looks. How it feels.”

The conversation went soft. The grip on both his knees weakened, and Barba stood. Because he had not been able to stall himself from taking that particular leap, he set about hurling down excuses to soften his landing. 

“Maybe we rushed into things? No, you know what--I’m certain we did. And it’s all coming to a head, and it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just--” 

Barba paused, and dug into whatever sense of natural honor he still possessed. The argument was absurd--a year in or not. The very notion that they’d been thoughtless about anything could not stand against time, against Boston, and France, or even a moment of heartbreak therein. He knew it and Carisi knew it, and yet--Barba believed there was surely some substance behind Carisi’s misery, as well as the action from which it stemmed. For as long as it held, Barba still saw his offer as kindly and--though it stung his pride--prophetic.

Not tired.

Not old.

Not much too late.

“Take some time for yourself,” Barba repeated, and hated that he sounded so meek, so small. Like he had to take cover elsewhere, and say these things from a sheltered place of regret and resignation. He shrugged, helpless to stop his own mouth from running his heart into the cold ground. 

His own thoughts on the matter suddenly felt like an imposition, and Barba just as well assumed in this moment that Carisi already knew what should happen next.

“You’ll enjoy it.” 

Carisi struggled to find his voice. It hung like an executed criminal in his throat, booted toes grazing the length of his esophagus. 

“I don’t want to,” Carisi said at last. The words scraped off his tongue and the backs of his teeth, and as much as Carisi wished to simply spit them out, they paced themselves and arrived slowly. “I won’t.” 

“I insist.” 

There was a moment where both men felt stricken with an unknown paralysis. Carisi could not move to issue his objections, and Barba could not bring himself to stumble forward and reclaim those foolish words he’d set out into the world. He sought to spare himself worse down the line, but could scarcely fathom feeling any less than he did now, pushing Carisi away by degrees.

Carisi only stared with wide, blinking wet eyes.

Barba stuffed his hands in his pockets--the picture of apathy. For the briefest of moments, Carisi did not recognize him. Even looking as Carisi had most seen him--slightly disheveled, but mindful enough to render himself prim and proper at a second’s notice--there was something perverted about the slump in the man’s shoulders, the softness set over his brow. This was _surrender,_ but only as Carisi had seen it in others.

On Barba, the sentiment did not hold. It was a disease affixing itself to a host.

Barba dropped his head, succumbing to that core sense of heartache Carisi believed he harbored well above all else. That--and not pride, anger, or glory--was Barba’s strongest insight into the human condition. 

In the suppressing silence, Barba withdrew his hands, then dragged them over his face, sighed into them, and let them fall away, warm. His posture slackened and he was--as he surely looked--spent. 

Carisi felt no greater shame than realizing Barba was disappointed in what he saw, here. That Carisi hadn’t proved that shining beacon of light Barba teased him of being-- _The Good Catholic,_ certainly, but beyond that _a good man._

Barba said it with such reverence, as if such a thing was spectacular or rare.

As if Barba wasn’t one, himself.

With that thought burning bright at the forefront of his mind, Carisi startled into action. All limbs, he leapt up from the couch and gripped Barba’s arm like he thought the man might make as great a departure as his reasoning. 

“Wait, no-- _listen._ ” Carisi all but turned Barba to face him, physically uprooting the man from his spot. A glimmer of surprise charged over Barba’s face, but was quickly undone by his sense of follow-through and duty to whatever cause he found best availed itself to him. 

Expediency, as it happened.

But Carisi was of a one-track mind towards righteousness. In idea or in deed, he would have it done. 

With the man looking him dead-set in the eyes, Barba knew at least this much. 

“I know you think you’ve got some great, gaping insight into my psyche, okay? I know you think you’ve got me figured out right now. But I’m serious--if you really forgive me, forgive me, and don’t put me through this ‘take a break, play the field’ bullshit. It’s not what I want. It’s not what you want. Don’t play me for a fool, Raf. I know you better than that.” Carisi’s brain caught up with his running mouth, and he looked ashamed for speaking out of turn. 

His grip on Barba’s arms eased, though he still held the man, desperate to know the privilege for as long as possible. 

“Don’t… scare me like this.”

Barba frowned.

“What are you afraid of?”

And to Barba’s own surprise, he genuinely wanted to know. There was so much now that still terrified _him,_ so much that he kept private for fear of how it would look or sound, to find terror in love and need and desire. This, when he’d known true murderous intentions. 

What was knocking at Carisi’s own walls?

“That you’ll find somebody else.”

Barba was duly unimpressed.

“Do you see men lining up the block for me?”

“They will.”

“Only if you send all your suitors as referrals,” Barba said coolly. He had no desire for compliments. 

“I lied,” Carisi said, and Barba wondered when Carisi’s saying so would no longer stop his heart in a tight panic. “I’m scared that you’ll be fine. Without me. That this will have all been excessive and--and pointless and you won’t ever want to try it again, because of all the trouble I’ve made for you.” 

Where his words might suggest that Carisi's face crumple in defeat, he steeled himself, and bore his heart: “I’m scared it won’t be worth it to you.” 

Barba's only counterargument was nothing sharp or well-worded, but it was the only one that mattered: “I _love you._ ”

“I know, and I love you, too, but--” Fear and frustration crept into the corners of Carisi’s eyes. He blinked hard to dismiss them. “You can reason yourself out of that. Raf, you'll always be smarter than is good for you.” 

Carisi was loathe to continue, to say what he felt was some awful truth that--maybe--even Barba didn’t know about him. It felt ugly and intrusive, when he did it. 

“Because you get like that. Something is ruined for you and you decide you never needed it. People. Your friends.” Wisely, Carisi held his tongue before explicitly citing the Catholic Church, though he alluded to it all the same. “God, Raf. I see it all the time with you.”

Carisi worried his lower lip between his teeth, and shook his head slowly for remembering: all the times Barba raised himself up after being knocked down, and the rest--the cool, calculating way he wrought carnage on a person. A sharp word was the least of it. Barba wielded morality like an automatic weapon, and the attacks were duly brutal. 

“You’re real quick to cut your losses, and I know you don’t do it easily. Sometimes it’s admirable.” Carisi thought of all he’d known about Muñoz--the good and the bad, and the fact that Barba had tried to be a good friend through it all. 

His voice caught, hung itself on Carisi's next admission: “Mostly it’s--it’s really fucking scary. I don’t want to be next.”

Barba said nothing. He could not promise leniency. 

“I know where you’ve drawn the line,” Carisi said. “With people, messing with you. I crossed it. I’m sorry.”

On all accounts, Barba believed that to be so. He'd lost count of the times he'd stirred from silence by Carisi's studious attention, itself conspicuously wordless (which was the likely tip-off). Beyond the wealth of himself Barba showed in his own home, or through intimacy, Carisi had labored and done something more with his time, something beyond bearing witness. Carisi had _learned_ him, in ways great and small, and for no other reason than he felt compelled. He couldn't not. 

Barba could have been pleased by that fact, preened under its generous glow. 

He wasn’t. He didn’t.

He flinched, thinking selfishly, _What, he’ll just do that for someone else?_

“Okay,” Barba said, suddenly on the verge of breathless. “That’s--fine.”

Carisi’s eyes bugged, and he inched forward, everything from the tip of his tongue to the ends of his eyelashes tasting a plea. 

“Fine? Like--”

“Yes.” Barba swallowed hard. “Argument--done. Conclusion--met. I’m fine if you’re fine.”

It was so decided, Barba knew, because his whole life and work and _being_ was earthbound. He held fast to the rule of law, and that very rarely ever hovered above the ground. It got kicked, it got dirty, it had to be salvaged at times, and rescued. Barba was a fighter, but only as much in the confines of a ground game. 

So forgiveness for a slight--however small in reality, or blown out of proportion in thought--was without question, because never in his life had Barba felt his heart flutter into the stratosphere except in the presence of this young man. 

He’d come to appreciate the view from up there.

Barba moved to collect their empties, then passed Carisi lightly, and brushed his cheek with a kiss. With long fingers wrapping warm around Barba’s wrist, Carisi stalled the man’s departure. He searched Barba’s face for traces of hurt and embarrassment--indeed, if Carisi had gone too far in his judgment, and sunk Barba’s pride as a result.

But Barba met his gaze with steely fortitude. He wasn’t hurt--just more certain of the end he’d leveled. He squared his feet on that higher ground he so often liked to claim, and looked softly upon Carisi.

“It’s late,” he said. “Come to bed.”

Barba broke away. 

Carisi held his breath a moment and watched as Barba made some minimal efforts to tidy his space--binning the empties, wiping down the countertop. Carisi wondered if perhaps Barba was drunk and somehow this escaped his attention. Maybe the man was heavily sedated with scotch and beer and thus not fully aware of what had transpired.

His forgiveness--besides undeserved--was unintended. 

They moved around each other in steps that were inherently strange and trance-like. It was as if neither man could stand to upset their tentative new reality, born though it was of too many words and, yet, all were somehow insufficient.

Barba went to the bedroom first, shucking his suspenders as he went so that they hung loose at his sides. Carisi followed, and continued to stare--dumbstruck--as Barba began to undress in earnest. 

It didn’t seem real that they should do this again, so easily, after everything. But Carisi--who had long denied himself these truths in particular--would not deny himself Barba, if indeed the man saw fit to give himself over.

Carisi had come to learn that moral purity wasn’t a hill he’d die on.

“So. What do we do so that this doesn't happen again?”

Barba made an effort to curb the comment towards conversational, though Carisi doubted it had come to the man's mind as anything other than an accusation. He buffed the edges and this was the result. 

“It won't,” Carisi said, now matching Barba button-for-button.

“Because, I get it. _Fuck heteronormativity_ and all that,” Barba waved a hand, casting aside decades of political and social strife with nary a care. He left his shirt hanging open and addressed his slacks. “We don’t need to stay home and watch _Jurassic Park_ on AMC like straight people.”

Carisi, half-bent over to relief his feet of socks, jerked his head up in alarm. “No, that’s like, _the best--_ ” 

“And I’ve done things,” Barba interrupted. Carisi noted that he sounded neither proud nor ashamed--only adamant, as if what Carisi had done was a repudiation of the quiet life they shared, and Barba had more than enough experience to stand against it, too. 

“Lived this whole life, even, before you.” 

Barba heaved those words into the room and left them there to crater the ground and cause the floorboards to splinter. There was weight in the sentiment to which Carisi did not want to answer; he felt it was entirely too great. He’d asked, in the past, and Barba had answered him plainly. Men he’d loved and not, but slept with anyway. The times he remembered being deliriously happy and crushingly empty--sometimes both in a single night.

Barba had told him of sex that wasn’t particularly particular, and long spells where he’d wanted nothing but love, but gave himself every excuse to play blind to its suitors. 

The stories always struck him as some absurd fantasy, things Barba was surely storytelling and polishing up, because how could he have managed it? How had it not proved impossible?

Displays of strength and love--and sexual lust--spoken of in frank and genial terms hadn’t made Carisi uncomfortable, only dismayed. Like he was sure he was missing something--the point, really. Because if Barba had had all that, what more could he want?

Those thoughts touched his face even now, resurfacing like a bloated corpse.

At a certain point, Carisi’s intrigue in Barba’s sexual history fizzled out. There were names enough he did not know, and things done that Carisi wished had been his to chance, to conquer. He chose instead to devote himself to obscuring those memories, to heap them well into the past, making way for whatever bright, shining, succulent moments he and Barba made between themselves.

Barba disappeared into his bathroom to brush his teeth. Carisi hoped he’d have a moment to himself--to breathe, to plan--but Barba ducked back out through the door, toothbrush protruding from pursed lips. 

“Do we go dancing? Bar hop?” 

Barba didn’t like the idea even coming out of his mouth. That was well and fine when he had a mind for frivolous fun. He didn’t, anymore, or else the activity no longer aligned itself resolutely with _fun._ There were too many pains to take to socialize and explain himself and his partner. And very simply, Barba continued to like what he’d always liked: theatre and the opera, films and books. Solitary enjoyment of great works of art and--perhaps--witnessing those things with someone special. 

He wasn’t going to be awed by a shellacked dance floor, much less a keyboard remix of a Top 40 Hit blaring overhead. 

“You don’t have to _do_ anything,” Carisi insisted. Then, on the off-chance Barba was being genuine with his offer, Carisi gave a meek suggestion: “Or we could kiss.”

“I know you're kind of new at this, but we've rounded the bases.”

“I mean, in public.”

“We do that. Or do you mean specifically at urinals? Does that wet cake smell just really light your fire?”

Barba disappeared into the bathroom again, to spit.

Carisi mumbled his reply and Barba, not particularly flush with patience, demanded clarity.

“What’s that?”

“I said, _you_ never kiss _me.”_

Barba was slow to make a return appearance. When he did, he was treated to a vision of Carisi, naked save for his boxers, sat on the bed, but not in it. The cold raised the flesh of his arms, but Carisi was adamant in his decision to follow Barba’s lead, and not overstep himself.

Barba sort of sagged in the doorway, knowingly or not making Carisi wait in the chilled air.

“I don't… I have to stand on tip-toe,” Barba said, and made a face like he was telling jokes against a brick backdrop in the early nineties. _What’s that about?_ “It's just easier if you do it.”

He flicked off the light in the bathroom, and soon Carisi was sharing a bed with Barba. Where the apartment had a crisp, clinical freeze about it before, it was now sweltering in the dark. Carisi touched their legs together, and found the sensation remarkable.

He ducked his head and turned readily on his side to face Barba, who always started towards sleep on his back with his arms folded, as if the wait for rest was highly tedious and suspect, and his petulance was warranted.

“Holy shit. I mean, I figured it was an ego thing, but--really?” Carisi grinned, and with the relief he felt at Barba being at his side and acknowledging Carisi’s claim, he felt inclined to tease the man mercilessly. “You don't want to… rise to the occasion?”

“Testing me already,” Barba hummed. “You’re just chock-full of good ideas.” 

In the dark, despite their fight, despite everything--Carisi knew he was pleased.

Carisi threw an arm behind his head and let break a breath he’d been holding long before last night. It was months old, to be sure, and a thing buried deep in Carisi’s psyche. Fleeting, flirting glances were among the forefront of his problems--little discrepancies wiped from the battlefield as Carisi approached with bayonets, and Barba rode in on an aircraft carrier.

Instead, it was Barba’s desire to be--and be _seen_ \--with him that had concerned Carisi since the start. It took root again and again, a malignant presence that emerged even after his heart had settled nicely into peace. 

Carisi spoke up to the blank ceiling, saying, “I guess that's a relief. I thought you didn't want anyone to see. I was worried we were back at square one.” 

Beside him, Barba smiled, but it was only this: hurt and embarrassment tugging at the corners of his mouth. 

He sat up and turned on a bedside lamp. Carisi was up like a shot to face him, and Barba did not leave him wanting for an explanation.

“I don’t understand you,” Barba said. His voice was quiet, but steady. “The dates--on their own, I understand. I see how that happened. But I don’t understand the dates, with the added bonus of you _not_ dropping all the talk about openness and family and--and _kids._ Those are commitments, Carisi, and so is this. This-- _us_ \--before all of that.” 

In the half-light of the room Barba looked warmed-over, with gold-kissed skin and soft hair free from any product. He was everything Carisi wanted to say _yes_ to, to please, and to find pleasure with. He felt his face flush hot even as the breath in his lungs sat sated and still. All of Carisi’s physical form seemed to hold its breath in anticipation for some great, seismic event. 

“Oh,” Carisi said, realizing he’d gotten well ahead of himself. To be making requests in the midst of an apology was poor form, at best. “Yeah.” 

Silence held like tar, and both men suffered on contact. Carisi felt sickened by the wait for his own thoughts, words, and ideals to surface. He supposed he thought Barba--with ever the sharp-tongue and mind for a fight--would have more to say than simply asking for clarity and--what?

Tenderness?

If he had not seen it with his own eyes, Carisi would have balked at the idea of Barba pleading sadly for grace. 

No great, new explanation bubbled to the surface. Carisi had to shovel out the old: “I’m really sorry. I’m sorry and I’m embarrassed--”

“ _You’re_ embarrassed?”

And he did not have to explain: it was Barba who’d had no idea this was going on, who’d met Carisi’s family never knowing their tactics, who was _beyond_ embarrassed. He was _mortified._

Carisi wished Barba would turn off the light, and let him press his apologies into flesh. It was a sorry fantasy to have, but Carisi indulged himself. He imagined Barba wriggling away from kisses and getting huffy as he awaited delivery of due payment. Carisi saw Barba pushing Carisi’s own head down at the very sight of those eyebrows tenting low towards mediocrity. 

And Barba would have something strict and prim to say, but of course every consonant would curl up, smug, and Carisi would find normality return with those first teasing bites.

_Don’t tell me you’re sorry. Show me._

Carisi imagined swallowing down every apology he’d given, and then some. But Barba was not in the mood. 

“I’m sorry! And, okay, _you’re right._ I’m everything you said--I’m stupid, I’m naive.” His accent was coming in thick and wet and again, Barba was reminded of the ocean. He was watching Carisi drown.

Carisi continued, the picture of defeat, “I’d have to be, to think that I could change anyone’s mind about me.”

“About _you?”_

Barba was again struck by Carisi’s read of the evidence provided. It was Barba, rather, who should feel like the target of this concerted effort. He was the one being dismissed and played and purposefully sidelined. 

There was well enough for Carisi to take credit for--Barba’s feelings of ostracization from people with whom he wasn’t close, had no social touchpoint beyond Carisi himself. 

Why should _his_ troubles be the hill on which Carisi chose to die?

Carisi sank into bed, turning over from his side to his stomach and burying his face in his hands, and losing both into his pillow. He made a quiet, sorrowful sound--a wet death rattle from the carcass of an animal as his heart rate slowed to that ultimate halt. 

In that too-warm place where his face met flesh met goose down, Carisi saw the truth before his eyes before the dark spelled stars with it. He--still--did not want to say. He’d said so much. Barba had bore _so much._

Carisi felt he’d sprung a trap laid at his birth. Why hadn’t he prepared for it? Why hadn’t he given the plans to Barba earlier, and together fortified themselves? 

He wondered, very simply, if he thought Barba would entertain much more. Carisi felt a new wave of hot shame tear through him as he realized his fear was that Barba didn’t have the heart for it, that he would try for sympathy and find the well had gone dry. 

Short-tempered was the least of it; much of Barba was in short supply.

“There were women, too,” Carisi said, still hidden. He felt as though he’d been given a stay of execution, and then proceeded to taunt the judge.

“Dates with women.” Barba said, and Carisi heard those words play overhead like a warcraft sending missiles screaming to earth. “That your family…” Carisi felt certain death whizzing by his ear. 

And then, of all things, a hand laid gently on his back.

“Sweetheart.”

It was said that same as _Listen, Stupid,_ which cast a kind light on the first, and confirmed with the second that Barba _did_ desire tenderness, because here--ever the reluctant mentor--he’d gone and showed Carisi how it was done.

Carisi didn’t turn over, didn’t avail himself to the necessary gift of air or the perils of being seen. Whether the matter was yet to blow up in his face or if Barba squeezed a few more drops of sympathy from stone, Carisi did not see himself surviving either outcome. From a loss, the hurt would be too great.

If forgiven, Carisi would not know what to do with himself. Men who face miracles--they lost their minds.

Still into the lines of his hands, Carisi spoke: “Daniel was the first--uh--guy. After you came to Mass. Before that--just women. So, I wasn’t lying when I said it was… progress.”

Finally, Carisi revealed himself. His face was hot, drawn in distress. He saw that Barba’s expression was curiously soft and searching. 

“The women… Every time, they say hi, start in quick like, ‘Your mother mentioned you’re a lawyer…’ and the first thing outta my mouth is, ‘Did she mention I’m gay?’ And. Sometimes they get it, and that’s it. Sometimes they’re hurt, ‘cause their time is wasted and they’re embarrassed, sometimes they’re angry or,” _Disgusted,_ Carisi didn’t say, but thought loudly enough for Barba to make out without straining his senses. “And I… I’ve begged my mom to stop.”

Carisi’s gaze flickered towards Barba, who seemed to be listening. The look on his face was something strange, a mix between resignation and relief. Carisi did not like the sound of either, so he pictured instead the ease and cool of Barba, back in Boston, in the sun, on a borrowed blanket, idly combing the grass with his fingers.

Carisi wanted to ask _that_ Barba, who had overcome his own trials and settled himself on the side of desired peace, what to do. How to live, now, in this reality not of his choosing.

“How do I do it? How do I convince them?”

Barba blinked--or maybe Carisi did--and the vision was gone.

“It hurts to be asked that, huh?”

“Jesus Christ Almighty. What is wrong with me?” Carisi wanted to shrink and disappear again, but Barba’s heavy hand on his middle stayed his departure. So Carisi stared hard--through Barba--and into nothing. “I can’t go my own way and pretend it’s not a problem. ‘Cause it hurts me, like it hurts them.” 

“Right, but, Sonny--they’re in the wrong.” 

Barba’s tone climbed as he found more and more-- _and higher and higher_ \--ground for Carisi to stand on, but Carisi would not join him there. 

_They’re wrong,_ Barba wanted to shout, and shake Carisi until he understood it. _Doesn’t that alleviate your guilt? Lift your shame?_

Carisi fiddled with the hem of the bedsheet and said, “That doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.”

Barba understood, now. Carisi’s fear wasn’t that Barba wouldn’t forgive _him_ or _his misdeeds,_ but that he would be incapable of even considering the manner of their making. 

_Circumstances,_ Barba recalled. And Carisi had a hell of a collection.

“Well,” Barba said, and tried in vain to keep from feeling at all touched by every awful fated thing Carisi seemed to fall into as of late. 

(No, Barba knew that wasn’t fair. These issues had been hounding Carisi for decades. All he’d done was never step so much as a toe out of line. Only once he chose to be all that he was in earnest practice was he reprimanded for it.)

“We can’t keep arguing and having it end with me feeling sorry for you, okay?” Barba said, and only felt a little bad about it. “You’re going to have to do something.”

“I know.”

“You won’t like it.”

“I know.”

“Neither will they.”

They sunk back into bed. Carisi found himself less terrified than before, and not at all like he was going to step outside this fantasy. 

He thought about consequences. 

Barba turned the bedside lamp off, and wondered after choices. Carisi’s were past; what Barba did next would set the mandate going forward.

“I want some time to myself,” Barba said into the dark, and in the moment Carisi held his breath, the room seemed empty. Barba supposed that was just as well. 

“Breathing room,” he specified, and was sure to meet Carisi’s hand with his own, and unseeingly intertwine their fingers. “Just a couple of days. I honestly think it would be the best thing for you, too.” 

_Consequences,_ Carisi reminded himself. A man ought to stand them well.

“Is that enough to placate any more irrational fears of yours, or need I go on?” 

“No… I get it.” Carisi squeezed Barba’s hand and found the warmth reassuring. “Like, now though?”

Barba cracked another sideways smile, and was sorry there was not light enough for Carisi to see it by.

“No. Not right this minute.”

-

When Carisi left in the morning, there was fresh snow on the sidewalk, stuffed in crevices, and lining windowsills. He left the first steps out of Barba’s building, the long gait pressed there for Barba to spy later, if he so chose to look.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lol this is beyond late but the show is _garbage_ YOU FEEL ME.
> 
> All my love and thanks to you readers. :)

For some days, the sky cleared and sunlight abolished the snow--bit by bit, every day at noon--and soon, the City stood bare. There wasn’t snow but packed in the odd alley, where the buildings stood too close together to allow any creeping warmth. It was only cold. 

Barba lost a case the following week--his first in a very long while, and it did not go unnoticed by the scads of defense attorneys he went up against. The common conclusion seemed to be, _About fucking time._ Even from Barba’s superiors, there was an air of understanding inevitability, which Carisi (relegated to an observer now, only) rightly guessed bothered Barba _more_ than any snide word from even the most roundabout of colleagues. 

Though, Carisi suspected Barba’s first thoughts were for his clients, who only sought justice, who knew nothing of his winning streak, let alone their place disrupting it.

But his were only conjectures, as Carisi had to hear about the loss ( _second hand_ from _Fin_ ) on a slow afternoon in the precinct, and summarily had to pretend he was the first to know. 

“He can’t be much fun to be around right now,” Fin supposed. He made the statement lightly, lest Carisi read between the lines and figure Fin could mean that much about Barba _anytime._

“Nah,” Carisi said, though ultimately it was a guess. “But who would be?” 

Fin shrugged, accepting that. He’d worked the case, and no doubt agreed that the outcome was a miserable and undeserved one. There wasn’t much to be done for those handful of persnickity jurors who saw leeway in terms of consent. 

Selfishly, Carisi wondered if this professional lapse would tip a personal reconciliation. Maybe Barba would call to have his ego stroked, or simply to commiserate, and Carisi could take the bait and run with it. 

But Barba was much too stubborn for that, and the only texts Carisi replied to came from Bella, though they were _at best_ not helpful, and at worst beyond reproach.

_[rafael still icing u out, big brother?]_  
_[lmaooooo almost had a typo there]_  
_[things would have improved if that was the case tho]_  
_[jk jk jk]_  
_[ ‘,:) ]_  
_[bringing back the old time smiley what u think]_

Admittedly, it wasn’t much to reply to.

\- 

He saw it like this: a return to his own existence, where, it seemed, nothing had spoiled or fallen out of style. There would be work, eating, sleeping, and the fulfilment of his time with errands and desires and those simple, solitary thrusts into living. 

Life was as he’d left it before traipsing off with a lovely young man. 

Without a warm body to keep him up at night, Barba slept early and woke early, and with all his unspent energy went for morning runs while the streets were still clear of slush and absent any new snowfall. He chased the grey, snaking shores of the Hudson, his pace set by a desire to offset the ache in his heart by the burn of his lungs.

Cold crept in through the half-inch opening of his jacket, and spread from there across his shoulders and down his arms. When he thought to zip up fully, the game was already lost; he’d all but swallowed the chill. 

He ran until his sides tightened themselves with imagined stitches, and his legs felt weak. Until his teeth chattered like broken window shutters against the wind and the cold. Until his face felt held by invisible hands, and raised to find whatever shreds of light escaped the cloud cover masking the skies.

He did this, because when he slowed, his brain emptied out and he got to thinking that maybe what he and Carisi had wasn’t meant for chasing. And if he couldn’t keep up, what did it matter?

Barba ran that thought out of his head, too.

In his apartment, Barba was less sanctimonious with his thinking. It helped that he saw outright what he stood to lose: the simple comforts afforded by company, the hallmarks of another being’s presence. This went well beyond leftovers lined neatly in tupperware and tinfoil--bits of scattered laughter or the soft noises of a contented life beyond Barba’s own. Barba missed the familiar set of hands over his body, breath spent on his throat--reminders that he was alive, and that was no mere happy accident. Not anymore. 

There were imbued in him now purposeful designs of life and continued living. Every breath he took, he borrowed. If the source was not from Carisi’s own lips, then Barba supposed he’d have to reconsider his stance on all-knowing, all-seeing supernatural entities.

He found his head distractingly empty when his thoughts did not veer with some frequency to timing and work schedules, and where one might find an open opportunity. 

For the first time in a long time, being alone did not unsettle Barba. He did not see threats down every quiet corridor, or conjure them up to satisfy his growing paranoia. He neither heard intent in the foot traffic outside his building, nor malice in those voices that traveled the shared hallway outside his door. Instead, he discovered something new: a thing within himself, bowed until it could be named hollow, and filled with silence like clear water into cupped hands. 

And there was so much _room._ Inside himself and out. He could practically sound off echoes just by setting his coffee mug in the sink, and his thoughts did very much the same. _Well,_ he’d start, but the thought got away from him, falling deep into that kept place. Like a stone ricocheting off the walls of a deep, subterranean enclosure, then seemed to taunt, _well, well, well…_

He took turns harboring the quiet, then disrupting its simple attitudes.

It was a strange, numbing practice. Useless, too. He left messes for himself--an odd mug out of place, in these terms, though as far as messes went… he’d toppled some egos, in his day. Broken some hearts, if he cared to count them. 

He considered where the pieces had gone to, if not gathered tightly in his own two hands.

-

The weather grew distasteful again on a Thursday night, when the snow began to pick up, first pouring down from the sky and then whipping up off the ground in skirting winds. Barba, who set aside a mound of paperwork because his glass of scotch was nowhere near as large as to tackle it with, didn’t think twice about sending some sorry delivery boy out into the storm with his single serving of sushi. 

He puttered around his apartment, exploring what felt like undiscovered space. 

He filled it with another glass of scotch and a glow from the muted television, casting shadows that doubled for company. 

Barba considered what were no longer options, but potential outcomes. He’d stricken chance from the record when he asked for space. 

He had it, now, and thoughts enough with which to fill it.

Either he overplayed his hand and Carisi would stray like he’d feared--and then _asked_ \--of the man, or Barba would fulfil Carisi’s prophecy, and find satisfaction in the mundane, and see himself as he had been, again, and rather like the lone figure he struck. 

Barba sipped his scotch, and found he could no longer feel the lip-twisting burn. He rolled his eyes at himself--and had to appreciate the look of it all--and supposed it was that simple: he wanted Carisi to hurt, but only for as long as the thought itself gave Barba a taste of brutal satisfaction. 

Because of course the notion would soon sour, only to run like turpentine down the back of Barba’s throat. He threw back his scotch, _wanting that._

A little punishment of his own. 

He sat and stewed in silence, certain that neither the record player nor television could hold his attention. He searched, anyway--through his record collection, first, thumbing the age-softened sleeves of Carisi’s favorites, then his own. The distinctions would soon be without merit, and their preferences solely for the other’s enjoyment. It would be some feat: Carisi veered towards those haunting ballads of a religious bent, no matter the language. How Barba would confuse those for his jazzier tunes would take some inspired bumbling. 

_Television,_ Barba decided. He’d find no sentimentality there.

He pumped up the volume to overrun his own stream of thought, and settled on one of those awful reality shows Carisi claimed to watch only at Rollins’ behest. There was all the requisite plotting, screeching, and showboating--and in a way, Barba could see what was appealing about it. 

(Still, Barba maintained that Carisi could dial it back some, perhaps donate a kidney to her, and maintain the friendship on a less extravagant scale.) 

Barba recounted every sweetened wrong, every respective desertion of personally-held values, plans, and promises one gladly made for the other. Barba counted the ways in which his life had changed as Carisi’s had blossomed. 

If it was a choice, was it ever wrong? 

Barba punched at the remote, careering through the channels. Color and shape lost meaning as both gave way to a pleasant, dizzying blur. It was a combination of this and the scotch, Barba decided, that had him arranging questions out of the truth. Was love in the cards for him, and did Carisi wield the strongest hand?

He laughed at himself. _Metaphors?_

That was _definately_ the scotch. 

He wondered if he harbored any true doubt--and with it, a great, seeping wound--or merely a bruised pride. He wondered after expediency, and how a life built on it surely lacked a genuine foundation. He could make his way in the world without any attachments, but when he sped off, lighter for the dropped baggage, would the journey not be too lonesome? And when he arrived at those much-lauded landmarks in life--promotions, losses, changes--who would celebrate him, or comfort him, then take his hand and help him forward?

Barba stopped at a familiar sight: great and fantastical. _Absurd._

Carisi came to mind, and Barba blinked first. 

_[Jurassic Park is on.]_  
_[Come over?]_

-

That same night, Barba played their reunion off as cool and calculating. Dismissive, as if Carisi’s absence--like his company--were two sides of the same unremarkable coin. It was cold, it was _childish,_ but Carisi did not let those sharp edges cut the corners of his own efforts. He met Barba soft and pliant--a warm touch, at first. A kiss, later, and then more, and well beyond that. He saved his words for last, but Barba stole them out of his mouth, and played back a different tune.

Barba said, _“I love you, okay? I do.”_ into the heat of Carisi’s neck, repeated over the slope of his collarbone, _“Okay?”_

Against a nipple: _“I love you.”_

And face-to-face, as Barba lifted his above his destination, catching Carisi’s eye before taking the man’s cock firmly in his grip--

_“So don’t scare me like that again.”_

-

They finished in bed, and stayed there. Limbs thrown loose in ache, they were a tangled sum atop softly striped sheets. 

A languid, loose scene held itself between them: Barba and Carisi shared warmth, and their bodies seemed to promise an unlimited amount.

Between Carisi’s gasping finish and Barba’s form resting heavy and secure over his bare back, encompassing the whole of him, they arrived at a turning point.

“Don’t tell me to leave again,” Carisi said--still breathless. He wet his lips--bruised--and swallowed--dry. “I want to be here, through the hard stuff. Yours and mine.” He tried to turn his head to catch a glimpse of Barba, but all he saw was curves of flesh--a bicep, the flat of a hand, and just a beak of brow before dark, mussed hair. “That’d be better, right?”

“Stop--talking,” Barba said, and Carisi loved the strain in his voice. When it tested itself, went high and frayed. He thought it was a fantastic transformation. 

Barba gave a little whine of dismay and added, “I’m still inside you. Jesus.”

“Raf.” Carisi reached an arm back in search of Barba’s hand. He got thigh and ass instead, and gripped it all the same. Barba could stay exactly where he was, and ache for it, but Carisi wanted his word. “At least try?”

“Yeah. Yeah-- _yes._ Okay.”

Barba pulled out and away. In the harsh light of the bathroom, he cleaned himself, his bare feet dark atop the gleaming white tiles. He felt warm despite his nudity, at ease despite the heavy steps that led him there. After cleaning himself and washing his face--he got so red in the brow and cheeks when they fucked, and didn’t like Carisi’s smiling after it--Barba returned to bed, crawling back into place atop Carisi.

Carisi huffed a breath through his nose--they hadn’t been apart so long that he’d forgotten how Barba liked to do things. The man preferred his space, and would concede to cuddling Carisi’s form only when they were no longer slick with sweat. 

“It's cold,” Barba said, preempting any comment. “I need the extra body heat.”

“You're not getting much of that from me.”

Barba kissed the shell of an ear. “Oh, well, you've convinced me. I take it all back.”

Under him, Carisi shuddered. Barba’s body stirred against him, and Carisi fantasized for a moment if he wasn’t so full of thoughts and questions, the sex would have drained him, and he’d hardly be there--an apparition where there had once been a body. An idea where the mattress sank and the sheets gave way for a man’s weight. 

Carisi knew Barba had instigated their time apart to save face. He was hurt--more even than he'd say--and tended his wounds with a taste of his own formality. 

He hadn't expected to be _bored_ by his own efforts.

Carisi did not want to say this much, to deter Barba’s sweetening hold on him with all the cold calculations that put it there. He wanted to share that he understood the reaction, and was glad Barba reached out when he did. But the words--both sweet and sensible--did not find him in time, and what came spilled from his lips was his more usual fare, all salt and Staten Island.

“Geez, Raf. My backside’s not a punch card. Contain yourself, huh?”

He left Barba duck his head against his neck, nose fitting nicely into the slope there. Barba’s lips split apart to reveal a slick-toothed smile, which Carisi felt press into the flesh of his shoulder. 

“You ask me to come over and fuck while dinosaurs watch. I think I’m owed a gentlemanly afterglow experience.” 

As the smile grew wider, Barba’s teeth opened and set on flesh in a useless effort to contain it. Any pain Carisi might have felt was dulled by the sheer joy of Barba’s expression, hidden as it was for posterity.

“Awful,” Barba managed to say, finally smothering the grin. “You’re awful.” 

Carisi felt a chaste kiss follow where the teeth had been. 

It was some untold bounty of riches that he should have both. 

-

They did--finally--talk about the loss Barba suffered in court. 

Barba was aware of his mistakes, his overreaching, his high expectations. The circumstances of his choosing, and those he could not avoid. He was aware, too, that he’d let them all slide by far too lightly. He spoke plainly about the intricate errors leveled in court--his failure to spin a witness back around after a slick defense attorney twisted his story up and spit it back out. Some piece of evidence or another that he did not beat directly into the jurors’ heads. And--worst--his inability to break the handsome perpetrator’s world apart on the stand. This man did not deserve the sterling reputation he’d forged, much less the doubt it afforded him. 

Barba concluded that his own complacency was his downfall, a notion Carisi found inherently absurd. Barba’s instincts--about law, policy, and people--were razor sharp. He didn’t misstep, even amidst a flurry of punches or weak ground on which to do battle. 

But Carisi did not argue his point. 

He let Barba win this one.

It was the right choice. Barba quieted, and settled in sidelong to Carisi, heartbeats chasing one another until they fell into a pleasing rhythm. It echoed between his ears and reverberated under his skin. Barba decided that this dual cacophony of the audible and the physical was more satisfying than his own righteous indignation. His pride--so often fed by all he did--could not fill him up like that. 

Besides his point, barba had likewise given up the vestiges of his day. He’d traded his suit for sweats, and his hair was loose, drawn over his forehead in unkempt waves. His heavily-lidded eyes were bright despite the topic of conversation, and Carisi supposed that was how it had to be. Nothing but incomparable light from the inside could force those dark feelings to surface, then scatter, in bits and pieces of conversation with a trusted confidante.

Carisi held him where they sat, a pleasantly warm mass on Barba’s couch. Carisi kept longways with his back against the armrest, and Barba had found his way nestled between Carisi’s legs, and reclined on the man himself. A record spun a soft song in the background, and Carisi loathed the idea of the music ending, and either of them abandoning their position to reset it. 

Still hot on their lips was the remnants of a home-cooked meal, courtesy of Carisi and--to a lesser extent--Fin’s agreement to cover the tail end of Carisi’s shift. 

(If nothing else, Carisi had implored, Fin should do it for the beautiful cut of meat he had bought for the occasion. Fin jokingly agreed on the condition of leftovers, though Carisi had taken that to heart and already set aside a portion.)

And all this, after an unexpected and fierce bout of fucking to challenge the respective tedium and grime of their days. Barba gave everything and Carisi found relief. 

It was--save for the subject of conversation--a welcome return to normalcy.

In a lull in the conversation, where the music failed to bloom and take precedence, Carisi said as much. 

“I'm glad it's like this again. S’how it should be.”

An unnatural silence dawned. The record petered off and the City outside the apartment quelled its own million voices in wait--it seemed--of Barba’s. 

Barba moved, drawing an arm over the back of his couch, and sitting up on Carisi's thigh, some, to better face him. Carisi responded to the intent rather than the effort, and set about meeting Barba's gaze well before trying to get comfortable under his shifted weight. 

He stroked a thumb along a naked patch of skin, a pleasing gesture by any right, but covert, too. Barba was spelling into skin the answer he wanted to hear.

“How about we try something different?” 

-

Carisi was kicking snow off his shoes all the way up to Barba’s apartment. 

“Weather is shit. You ready to go?” Carisi hung back in the doorway, mindful of Barba’s spotless hardwood floors. He checked his watch, his concerns about lateness unfounded--at least from his end. 

Barba finally emerged from the bedroom, still straightening the lush red-and-pink floral patterned tie at his throat. Carisi smiled fondly at the sight, and the expression only grew to cemented itself in his features as Barba took his time straightening the white shirt cuffs beneath his grey suit, drawing on his coat, and considering a scarf. 

It was still a thrill to see a man such as Barba compose himself. There was art enough in the visuals, but Carisi most appreciated watching it all come apart, later. Patterns and colors hugged one another, then scattered, and Carisi had to stifle a grin after seeing the look recreate itself on the back of a chair or Barba’s bedroom floor. 

One aspect that never fell away was the smart expression on Barba’s face when he knew he had a rapt audience. 

“You look great.”

Barba made his selection and met Carisi with an unimpressed, “We saw each other four hours ago.”

Carisi slouched against the doorframe. 

Barba had looked good then, too.

“Ah, well, s’better lighting in here.”

Barba fought to keep the smile off his face. It was a resounding defeat.

“Oh, no, he thinks he’s cute.”

“Is he right?”

“...He’s pushing it.”

Carisi felt a surge of pride as an easy, crooked smile made its triumphant return to Barba’s face. The man was wholly, undeniably charmed, and summarily annoyed by that fact. 

Barba approached Carisi, eyes set with obvious intent. Carisi figured his tie was askew, or the collar of his shirt was peeking out over his jacket--his usual transgressions. But Barba raised his hands to find Carisi’s cheeks, and while standing as tall as he could manage, he guided Carisi in for a kiss. Everything from the press of his lips to the warmth of his hands on Carisi’s peachy-pink tinged cheeks felt resolute. 

_I’ll have you,_ it said.

_In the doorway, at dinner, and here again tonight._

Barba sank back--flat-footed again--but idly let his hands linger high to fix Carisi’s hair and--indeed--straighten his errant collar. His fingertips grazed along the wind-whipped flesh at Carisi’s throat, stirring warmth enough that Carisi could have shed his coat and not touched it again for the rest of the night. 

Barba let his gaze rise or fall to either objective, but refused to meet Carisi’s eyes in between. 

If Carisi was to trust his instincts, he’d have said the gesture was _shy._

In his own expression, there was no confusion: Carisi looked upon Barba with total adoration, unchecked pleasure, and a twinge of bemusement. His eyes shone as if caught in endless light, glittering well enough to render oceans dull in comparison. 

Carisi’s lips were pressed tight to relieve themselves of only a sly smile, when in actuality Carisi felt nothing less than a great, toothy grin would satisfy the warmth bursting from his heart. But giving all that he wanted would sooner split his features apart, and exhaust him. 

“Lyft’s outside,” Carisi said, a reminder to them both and the only argument, really, for not throwing away their reservation and making a night of things at home. 

Barba adopted a honey-sweet tone when he teasingly praised Carisi, saying, “You remembered I don’t like funneling cash to those who would align themselves financially and politically with a would-be-despot. How sweet.” 

Carisi wanted to say that he’d remember anything Barba said when practically _seething,_ and jamming his thumbs so forcefully at his phone’s screen so as to surely void any and all warranties.

Instead, he only smiled. He held the door for Barba, and locked it after him. 

“You look… really great.”

Barba paused at that, turned. His phone was in his hands--a work e-mail drawn open on the screen. Without looking, he closed it. His bright green eyes trained themselves on Carisi, focus flitting from the man’s own gaze, his pink cheeks, his upper lip. All the while, Barba remained cool, which kept Carisi fidgeting and suspect. 

“You know this isn’t our _first_ date, right?”

Carisi rolled his eyes.

“All your compliments--while _dear_ \--are unnecessary. I know how good I look.”

“Well, shit, Raf. If that line is off the table, what are we gonna talk about?”

As the walked down the hall towards the elevator, Barba pretended to consider Carisi’s goofy inquiry. 

He posed a solution: “How do I _smell?”_

-

The construction outside Barba's apartment--a topic of some focus, still, as if the thing was ever-new and deserving of discussion--still kept the car two blocks away. For the trek, Barba donned his Boston baseball cap to shield his face from angled snowfall. It seemed to spirit itself out of his coat pocket, more worn now than Carisi would have guessed, assuming its sparing use.

But then, maybe he was wrong about that.

Carisi smiled, seeing it deployed. He was still smiling when Barba checked it along with his coat at the restaurant, and the clerk inquired if he was a fan and Barba, oblivious, asked, “Of what?”

The surprises did not end there, because as they followed a hostess to their table, Barba's hand materialized at the small of Carisi's back, his lips on Carisi's cheek under the guise of a murmured and private word. Carisi heard none, and was never more pleased with Barba’s silence.

They were seated in dim, warm light. The hostess spoke and they went through the motions to reply. What was passing through them in smiles and looks over the dressed table and twinkling music was another conversation entirely.

“Happy now?” Barba asked when the hostess had gone, though the effort was unnecessary. 

Carisi was. He so blatantly, glowingly was. 

-

The meal--despite its inherent beauty and presentation--felt secondary to the company and conversation. 

Carisi kept Barba entertained with stories from cases they’d shared. It was some task to keep the discussion light, but both men had experience enough with serial killers and predators of the lowest order to find humor in the defenses they mounted for their own mortal souls. In the lives they led, there was sense, cause, and _time_ enough to see these men were punished to the fullest extent of the law, as well as laugh at the high opinions they all uniformly held for only themselves. 

“Self-described geniuses, all of ‘em.”

“We ought to orchestrate a sting at a MENSA meeting,” Barba smirked. His voice was pleasantly low and soft, and moreover soaked warm with wine. Carisi delighted hearing the man at ease; it seemed much too long since he’d last had the pleasure.

“Oh, you know those four-year-old piano prodigies are up to no good.”

Drawing Carisi’s eye now was the red pocket square at Barba’s breast, folded intricately to mimic the tiny budding roses adorning his tie. 

The conversation abandoned reality and returned to a time that--now--seemed so unlikely and pure, it had the very whiff of fantasy about it. 

“France was…” 

And they were off, bounding down a rabbit hole into that bizarre honeymoon phase that announced itself some months late into their grand seduction. Carisi touched a memory and it sparked a wildfire in Barba, whose teeth bit into a smile despite his best efforts to keep his responses mild and cool. He could not help but add his voice, to build a better picture of some day they spent sun-soaked and barefoot on a smudge of coastal beach. 

They reminisced after food and drink, and endless views of unremitting beauty. 

Sometimes, Carisi needed reminding that he'd gone and done that. And Barba had _asked._ That facet of the trip--made well before they stepped foot on a plane--was by far the most beguiling, most memorable. 

He kept mementos and other assorted proof. If he concentrated, Carisi’s feet would still relax and give way to the shape needed to balance on rocky pathways leading out towards the sea, disappearing under skimming waves. There were pictures aplenty Carisi had snapped with his phone and heavy Nikon alike--visions of Barba, white linen shirt unbuttoned, hair windblown, smile wide--but sharing the memories with another voice did them greater justice.

“...and Boston, really. In the end.”

“And Boston,” Barba agreed. He watched Carisi go pink at the memory, and was pleased that he should inspire such an unremitting thrill months after the fact.

“But here. Home. New York.” Carisi shook his head. “Sleepin’ in with you on a Saturday.” 

“Mhm,” Barba hummed. He was doubtful. “Because the French Riviera is nothing compared to six months of ongoing construction outside my building.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Sweet-talker,” Barba said, a soft accusation.

 _If only,_ Carisi thought. _The things I’d say._

Carisi said, then, goofily and with all sincerity, “Nah. If I could turn a phrase like you, this’d be a hell of a lot easier.”

Barba supposed that was a compliment, of a kind. That he should still make Carisi nervous and fated towards the Right Word was as desired an outcome as having the man predisposed to his bed, ever eager for contact. 

“You’re doing all right,” Barba said, nevermind that the same vision stirred in him an equally indomitable delight. For as well as he played that hand, however, Barba was certain Carisi saw through it, and knew Barba’s game, besides.

And therein laid the fun.

Barba’s tactics were seen as such, and not evidence of an icy core. Carisi played openly and earnestly, while his own underlying goodness allowed him to be mindful of Barba’s fear of being hurt or betrayed. Carisi did not see it as servicing a handicap, but merely playing by the rules. 

Carisi took a moment to appreciate the scene: the two of them under low, warm light, the meals spread between them across the short distance of tablespace, touched by candlelight as one small flame swam in a short crystal glass between them. There were Barba’s long legs occasionally bumping Carisi’s under the table, meeting in shared--if limited--space. In every facet of their date, Carisi felt compelled to register all he'd taken for granted--even if just hypothetically, and even then, only for a second.

Proximity begot closeness begot intimacy.

It was all Carisi had wanted, laid out in a linear path. He could picture it in an upswing, then setting itself right on an incline. Any obstacle fell well below them, and was minimized by their gaining height and distance. 

_Of course_ Barba would rise above Carisi's minor slight, Carisi reasoned. 

He could appreciate the view.

“Thank you,” Carisi said with an intensity so sudden it caught Barba off-guard. He swallowed the steak in his mouth and chased it with wine.

“That seems premature. You know we’re splitting the bill, right?”

“Really, Raf.” Then, quietly, and with a reverence that stalled Barba's attitude in his throat, “Thank you.”

Carisi leveled his gaze, and waited until Barba--suddenly elusive with his thoughts--relented and found him there. He witnessed in the look a kind of certitude that seemed out of line with fondness--it was so stern and unremitting--but Barba found that was precisely what should clench his heart and leave him breathless. 

He couldn’t deny that he preferred that much to _I’m sorry._

“Yes, well.” 

Uncomfortable with the proclamation--such as it was--Barba fast sought to dismiss it. He smiled, deep and assured, and sprawled the fingers on his right hand, stalled though it was wielding his fork above his plate. He coupled this with a concerted shrug of his shoulders, and was the very picture of pleasant nonchalance. 

“I’ve been told I need to empathize more. So there you go. _Relish it.”_

He returned to his meal a little too readily, and perhaps gave up the game.

“You don’t have to save face now,” Carisi tutted, stepping flat-footed into the perilous territory of Barba’s desert-dry pride. “I know you’re crazy about me.”

Barba smiled, appreciative of the return to play.

“It helps,” he allowed. He watched Carisi attend to his meal. _“More_ salt?” he observed. “You barbarian.” 

“I’d harvest it from your smart talk, but the technology’s just not there yet.” Carisi’s smile slid sideways to shameless, and if Barba was honest with himself, he was entirely taken with it.  
He parted his lips to make way for another acrid word, but Carisi slipped in ahead of him, caught speed on the purchased breath, and flew.

“You should come over to my place more,” he said.

“At all,” Barba corrected. He wasn’t about to lie to himself or Carisi--he could count on one hand the number of times he’d been there, always stepping sidelong into the place, like he should wait to be told where to sit. Space, suffice to say, was limited. 

The bed was fine--any they shared would be, he supposed. But the place itself made Barba feel like he’d arrived not in Carisi’s home, but been planted under his skin. 

He ran the subject through his mind, answering his own questions and doubts with what he guessed Carisi might go for--a veritable question tree for the mundane--and settled on a subtle, “Not one for the constant cab rides, then?”

“It’s not about money,” Carisi said, because that’s what Barba meant. “And I’ve got my metro card, so,” he trailed off, not noting that Barba always paid for the cabs they shared, going to and from the courthouse to Barba’s apartment in the evening, or dropping him off first at the precinct some mornings. 

“I just thought--if you felt okay about bein’ someplace else sometimes, it could be--I dunno. Fun.”

Barba pointedly set down his fork and took up his glass of wine. 

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

Carisi knew it would be too great a play to risk defining the concept of “fun” for Barba. 

He also knew his reasoning was clunky. True, Barba had been attacked in his own home, and made to feel unsafe within its walls--but that concern didn’t seem to follow him elsewhere. At least, not to Carisi’s naked eye. He supposed it was as good a barometer as any, and he wanted a reading. 

But the odds that his attempting to argue any reasoning without Barba hearing the echoes off that very idea were low, so Carisi did not chance it. 

In the same breath, he admitted defeat and called for a rematch. 

“Okay, so, do you have an actual reason for not wanting to come to my place?”

“It’s. Small.” Barba spoke evenly between bites of meal, sips of wine. “And. I don't like it.” He raised to fork to his mouth, but paused before taking the bite. ”Aesthetically.”

Carisi wore a sour expression in response, but it was as put-on as the clothes on his back. 

“You wanna pad this hot take out any, or leave it at that?” 

“It’s _really_ small,” Barba amended. “Which isn’t a reflection on anything other than the housing market. Promise.” 

“Hand to God?” Carisi asked, smarting a little. For his paycheck and student loans, his apartment was an unmitigated--and short--success story. He _had_ one. 

“If you think _His_ is the invisible hand that ups your rent every year…” 

Barba earned himself a chuckle with that one, but the question lingered. Why should Carisi want to share his space, when Barba assumed the only reason he returned to it was to be alone?

And if _that_ wasn't the case… Barba didn't need to be shrewd about it; he doubted much the same of Carisi.

But--to race headfirst to that conclusion, to beat others to it-- _was so deeply satisfying._

He waited until Carisi took his next bite to swan up to a thought, then let it fly: “I don't suppose this is your roundabout way of forcing my hand to ask you to move in with me.”

Carisi’s eyes bugged as he hasted to make a denial so ardent, Barba actually believed it meant it, and realized too late that he’d perhaps overstepped.

“No, seriously, I wasn’t--I _wouldn’t--_ ”

Had the smile on Barba's face fallen any harder, it would have made a dent in his meal. But it was tilted degrees to Carisi’s left, and Carisi--the topic of conversation forgotten--thoughtlessly turned to follow the line of Barba's eye. 

He saw a beautiful woman, long hair spilling down where the cut of her dress exposed her back. Her head was turned slightly, as if intrinsically aware of eyes on her from across the room. She didn't cover her mouth when she laughed with those at her table, and her smile--even just a corner of it--was radiant. 

If Carisi hadn’t recognized her from photos, she'd have still been in the top five things that could steal away Barba's attention from him. 

Emails. Casework. Freshly brewed coffee. The thudding start to a migraine. 

Lovers. 

Yelina Muñoz was a former lover, in this case, and her husband--sat beside her in a handsome blue suit--a once-longed-after prospect with no earthly possibility. 

Carisi realized he’d ruled things out at his own peril. He hadn’t known what to expect for a fancy meal at some lavish restaurant with Barba (he’d been aiming for a pleasant evening that took them straight to bed), but running awry of Barba’s former lover and friend--both of whom he’d torpedoed his relationships with amidst a political scandal--seemed about right. 

The couple were sat side-by-side at a table forged larger than Barba and Carisi’s own, so that a third person fit comfortably across from them. Alex was dressed in a sharp suit, and Yelina in a striking cocktail dress. Neither person appeared to bear the shame and weight of a public lashing. Barba, knowing Alex like he did, wasn’t surprised. Alex could have just as well shucked humiliation like a coat, and had it fitted in the cloakroom with a ticket.

Their company had the dull-suited, white-faced look of bureaucracy. Barba recognized him, while Carisi went broader, and only guessed at his kind. And the intimacy shared between him and the handsome couple suggested they were dining with a fourth guest: the man’s importance.

Their meal was finished, save for coffees. Barba wondered how he’d gone even a minute without spotting them, and then of course--how long he and Carisi had been caught under Yelina and Alex’s eye, yet oblivious to it. He had to assume they'd seen their arrival, their kiss. Heard their laughter, even, and altogether were witness to their _being_ \--together or otherwise.

 _At all,_ Barba supposed. He hadn't heard from either Muñoz since his ordeal made the news with its brief--and damning--trial. 

Yelina had called his office, left a mildly congratulatory word with Carmen. He'd texted her back, but received no further contact.

Barba wondered what was thought of them, here. Now. He wondered if he'd have curbed his inclinations if he'd known he was putting on a show.

Carisi shared those sentiments, in a way.

“Small Town, USA, huh?”

He entertained the sorry notion that Barba would flip their evening and attempt to busy it with something as mundane as work. He’d pull out his phone, maybe--or get blandly argumentative. 

Barba did neither. Instead, he served Carisi a look as if to suggest he knew the man's thoughts as surely as he found them needless.

“Okay,” he said, his voice fraying some in anticipation. “This will be… fine.”

Yelina rose from her seat, shared a short word with both her husband and their guest, then ventured across the room. 

Her golden dress petaled off her hips as she walked, each step a declaration. She put on her most cordial smile, and without a moment to spare, Barba did the same and stood to greet her.

Carisi followed suit, just a second out of lockstep. 

“Rafael. It’s been so long.”

“Too long,” Barba agreed at once. If they were friendly, still, they might have hugged. Carisi did not doubt Barba had hoped to, given the way he tipped slightly towards her. But she remained straight-backed and stalwart, her smile thinning, and Barba took the hint.

They weren’t.

“Yelina, this is Sonny.” 

“Your cop.” 

Yelina cocked her head only after making her point to Barba. Her dark, keen eyes gave Carisi a once over, affording him barely a glance before settling back on her former lover. It was his choice of a partner that intrigued her more so than the man himself, even as he was situated before her, all flesh, blood, and politely outstretched hand. 

“Detective,” Carisi corrected, still smiling. Slowly, he rescinded his hand when Yelina kept her head held high so as not to see it. “And lawyer. Technically.”

Yelina maintained her own smile, yet that practiced graciousness left her like wind dropping from sails.

“Rafi was never satisfied with just one thing.”

Barba clocked the comment and threw one of his own in record time: _“Really?_ Yelina, quién eres, mi madre?”

Carisi recognized the brand of contempt Barba leveled only towards those he knew and loved. It wasn’t quite playful, but a farther thing still from the deadened sort of insight he bore into those who fancied themselves as his enemies. 

Carisi had seen storied defense attorneys momentarily shrink under the weight of that tone. He’d been on the receiving end of it himself, not so long ago, but by his estimate, there was no worse a thing than that dull-eyed stare Barba threw at anyone--again, usually Carisi--who made an effort to play legal go-fish with him. 

Most particular about the look was how it addressed not just for its intended recipient, but all those within earshot. _Yes,_ it seemed to drawl, _I see what you did there. **A** stounding._

Carisi thought he shrank a solid three feet every time Barba had met him with one of those. He’d throw in a few extra inches with every snide remark, delivered so coolly, one might be mistakenly grateful for the attention (as Carisi often was).

Even this watered down version had some bite, and Carisi felt its sting by proximity alone.

Yelina Muñoz did not so much as blink.

“Am I wrong?” she asked. 

“You say that like you didn’t leave me,” Barba said, quietly, and again in Spanish. Yelina replied at length, her words suddenly sweeter as they played off a more familiar tongue. 

But Carisi knew better, given the look twisting over Barba’s face. His expression was no one thing but flitting--it was hope, clinging to an eyelash or a freckle, then disappearing, leaping to the next available surface as anger or embarrassment. It was an open heart, blitzed and scattered like ash; some of it caught the light and danced, but most was carried unceremoniously away. 

“Boy, are my ears burning.” 

By proxy and through mindful intent, Carisi’s Spanish had improved over the past year.

Yelina pursed her lips at the interruption, but a thankful Barba took it as his in.

“Alex is meeting with the City Comptroller,” Barba pronounced, nothing like a question. That Alex was dining with the same stuffed-shirts he accused Barba of cowing to went unsaid.

“You can’t put Alex down and expect him to stay there,” Yelina said--a proclamation, really. 

Or a new campaign slogan.

“That was never my intention,” Barba told her. “Can I say hello?” To the doubtful look on her face, her put-upon sigh and tensing posture, Barba proceeded: “I want him to succeed, I do. I believed in his promise, same as everyone. But what he did… and the coverup…” 

While Barba lowered his voice, Carisi bit his tongue. Being quick to forgive a man his sins had worked out well for Carisi in the past, so why should an objection prevail upon him now?

“That’s all in the past.” 

Yelina’s tone was neat and kind--a total departure from the hard look in her eyes. She wouldn't let this look like the fight it was.

“I hope so,” Barba said. He took her approach, and spoke soft syllables into what should have been a jagged insult. 

Yelina pointedly looked at Carisi before she spoke again.

“Your high horse is a rocking chair, Rafi. You’re going nowhere. Alex… he’s coming back from all this. You just wait.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Barba sounded tired, as though the prospect of Alex returning the center stage exhausted his spirit. “Yelina--” he stopped, struggled with the sentiment he meant to express, and what it was he truly felt. A sense of coverup bore on him like torrential rain. 

“It will always be my highest pleasure, seeing you. Knowing that you’re well.”

“Does he know that?”

“I know when he’s being polite,” Carisi said. His meaning was clear.

Bookending their encounter, Yelina made herself smile again. She was picturesque, a vision of loyalty and grace, but saturated past reality’s natural light. 

“Yikes,” Carisi observed when she’d gone. 

“An understatement,” Barba allowed, but Carisi saw him watching her fondly. That much, at least, was genuine. 

And to Barba's own detriment, _yes,_ but such was the way his heart sought to toy with his head, and eclipse his better judgment. 

Returning to their meal was an unexpected challenge. Nothing had so much as moved from its place, yet they stared long and hard, as if to relearn it all. Placements, portions, shares; everything was an unknown. 

Into that fitful silence, Barba explained his softness towards her, after everything. 

“She’s like that, you know. She can be cruel. It’s how I knew I could always trust her. Someone who’s nice all the time, always trying to please… there’s nothing there.”

“No offense taken,” Carisi said on Barba’s behalf. Barba shook his head.

“Not you. Not really. You’re just sneaky about it.”

Carisi didn’t know what to take from that, other than how certain Barba seemed in his read of Carisi’s character--shrewder side and all.

“Yelina… She’s such a big part of what I wanted to be. Happy, successful, married, in love. I wanted to be with her so badly. I wanted to be Alex.”

Carisi frowned, and hoped he hadn’t looked like he needed an explanation. 

“I know that, Raf. You told me that.”

Barba, of course, got the impression he was wanted for a _new_ excuse. Something he didn’t have. 

“Yeah, well--I’m not full of new things. Just the same old shit.” 

He stared at the table again, having forgotten it all already.

“I'm going to speak with him.”

“You want backup?”

“No,” Barba said, thinking how that was once Alex's role. 

When he didn’t rise to see his declaration done, Carisi, believing Barba meant to have Alex join _him,_ half-stood from their table. 

“You want me to--uh--step out for a minute?” 

“For a smoke break?” Barba asked pointedly. He’d given up that particular beast in his youth, but not _this_ one. Digging at Carisi for sometimes indulging felt like a stable kind of contention; he could feed his argumentative nature with something just as addictive--that unwinnable and ultimately meager battle. 

He shook his head, stood. 

“I’ll just be a minute.” 

-

The restaurant's low-light and high-vamp designing made Barba feel as though he was passing entire worlds in just the span of a single city block. Heavy red curtains hang from the walls, framing already-ornately-held portraits and landscapes rendered in heavy oils, the kind that licked up from the surface like a cresting ocean wave. Nearest Barba and Carisi, there was the rendering of Mary Todd Lincoln, dower in her very existence, but something else entirely when lighted from below, but climbing well into darkness. She looked otherworldly, or at least--as though she were escaping to one.

Barba felt strangely like he was following in her steps. She watched him cross the room in a near-perfect half-circle, so as first to swing near enough Alex’s table to be seen, and then to arrive at his destination: the bar. 

There was wine enough built into the walls to fill a cellar, but Barba’s eye was nearer than that, scanning just beyond the bartop for someone to aid in his quest. 

He needed more courage; what little got him here was fast escaping him. 

Drink in hand, Barba positioned himself at a spot at the bar mostly obscured to the rest of the restaurant by a pillar. He supposed if he had any genuine interest in masking their meeting, he’d have had Alex follow him into the bathroom. Instead, Alex approached him plainly, and they stood side-by-side like strangers, looking out into the restaurant, as if idly searching for a breakup or a proposal, things that seemed to best announce themselves in lovely places. 

“A leggy blonde, huh? Even when you step out into left field, you’re still trying to cow to your bosses.” 

Barba took a sip of scotch; it wasn’t half as hard going down as Alex’s insults.

“Was that a joke, Alex?”

“Sure, Rafi.”

“What was funny about it?” 

It gave Barba immense satisfaction to see the flash of surprise color his childhood friend’s expression. Barba could spit insults like buckshot; they’d wound everyone within a two-block radius. Alex had never aligned himself opposite of his friend, and was now getting the full treatment.

“Just you, Rafi.” Alex wielded the familiar nickname like an ax. “Getting yourself into trouble. You never really grew out of it.” 

“Better _trouble_ than never growing out of teenage girls.”

Even as he said it, Barba knew he’d gone a step too far.

“That was a set up.”

“Alex. Please. We both know better.”

“I don't know that we do,” Alex challenged, and sounded calm despite the charged subject. “Hank Abraham, my campaign manager? He was the real criminal, proven out in your court. He had access to my electronic devices.”

 _“Alex.”_ In his upset, Barba supposed he sounded incredibly naive. “He committed suicide.”

“During your investigation,” Alex pointed out. “That should mean something to you.” Then, looking out past their sequestered section of bar, Alex found a lean figure onto which he narrowed his sights. “I would have thought you could sympathize.” 

“Alex…” 

Barba’s tone was slow and warning. 

“Then don’t question my morality, Rafi. I’d hate to ask after yours.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“It looks bad,” Alex said, his voice soft and even as he pulled the words from a memory. He fixed his gaze on his childhood friend and asked only, “Isn’t that what you told me?”

 _It’s not the same,_ Barba knew, but arguing otherwise was useless. Alex only meant to _suggest_ misdeeds, which had been his own defense. The pictures, contact, and communication--what Barba knew to be _evidence_ \--was suggestible. And yet, there was not a single complaining witness.

Nevermind that he’d spirited any away into the word of pension plans--a state of being as permanent as death, but with considerably sweeter digs. 

_Look,_ Alex seemed to taunt. _See? It can apply to you, too._

Barba felt his chest constrict then fall--heaving, flayed open--as if he’d struggled for an icy gulp of breath from which he did not even benefit.

He coupled the burn in his chest with one down his throat, putting his expensive glass of scotch to good use.

“You’re out of line,” he said, but his words fell too quietly from his lips, and left little impact. Alex turned to the bartender, ordered.

Barba spied Carisi turning towards them in his seat, just to steal a glance. Barba wasn’t surprised anymore with the attention, and supposed it all went hand-in-hand: the habitual studying they did of one another, the twisting of Carisi’s neck to follow Barba when he walked away, Barba’s own observations made only when his subject was otherwise distracted. It was their humble beginnings--Carisi, appreciating him, and Barba, quick to dismiss mutual interest as an impossibility. 

A strange feeling paraded around in his gut, rallying until Barba paid mind to examine it. 

He felt a sense of responsibility to Carisi, who could scarcely see them around the pillar, much less intuit what was being discussed. Barba decided he deserved to have some assurances, here, even if Barba could not name them for himself. 

So Barba squared his shoulders, sipped his drink, and spoke not to Alex covertly, but simply, and plainly, and surely loud enough for the bartender to hear.

“You’re making a comeback, then.”

“I don’t quit, Rafael. You know that much.”

“Yes, I do.” 

And just like that--not a second since deciding otherwise--Barba felt his heart tip towards Alex’s favor. He was swayed by those ever-powerful drives: memories of the past, hope for the future. He was angry, still, for Alex’s betrayal, which loomed so high as to nearly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his crime. 

But there’s enough of Barba to lend itself to a share of the blame. Thinking there was something he could have done to help his friend, to convince him of the wiser path, one that did not mistake either righteousness or Barba’s own dogged interest in justice. 

“Do you think people will forgive you?” Barba asked, finding he was genuinely curious.

He watched a touch of pain brush Alex’s brow, and soften the edges of his trustworthy eyes. 

_I must be slipping,_ Barba thought, perhaps a touch too eagerly.

Alex said, “Yelina has.”

Barba supposed he wasn’t surprised. She wasn’t the denying type. If it sounded like it, it was only because Alex was, and she could only mount his arguments rather than make her own. 

And only this, if she knew it was bunk.

She’d take his words, will them to her liking, and put them back in her husband’s mouth. She was shrewd, a politician in her own right. And ruthless, even with her own heart.

Barba still loved that about her.

Envied it.

“Then there’s no telling what you can achieve,” Barba said, and meant it. 

Alex gave him a heartless smile. “Don’t you mean, ‘who I can fool’?”

“The two are hardly mutually exclusive.” 

“You’re an ass,” Alex said, but Barba heard the twinge of affection in the oft-shared declaration, and did not deny the accusation. His attention wandered again, and Barba found himself absent anymore to say to his former friend, but a world left yet where he’d strayed.

“Sorry,” Alex said, surprising Barba. He followed Barba’s wayward gaze and asked, “So, that’s your guy? Him?”

Barba was heartened to hear that, at least in this, there was no judgement. It was as if those fatalistic murmurings had been all a part of a game, or else directed at someone else--a common enemy the two could share, but never the other.

 _Like old times._

“Him.” 

Barba heard his own voice as bright and warm; pride, but not as he knew it.

“People who know you now probably think you’re crazy,” Alex said. He gave a single shake of his head and countered: “It makes perfect sense to me.” He leaned back against the bar, then, and the ice clinked inside his glass as the movement jostled it. 

“God, I remember you after that girl--Lauren Sullivan? And then her brother, that one day he picked her up from school in his buick--ugly fucking thing, with the red leather seats?”

Barba wanted to reason that it was a perfectly acceptable car, for its time. It was the 80’s--bad style _was_ the style. 

(It was better that than admit to himself the way he’d gone on about that car, and not the beachy-haired boy who’d been driving it, wasn’t a colossal embarrassment--if not for the sentiments he shared, then the notion that he was really hiding anything.)

“I’m surprised Yelina didn’t come to mind,” Barba said coolly. “But then, maybe I was never really competition for you.”

“What, you think it was easy?” For once, Barba thought Alex really knew what he had. The sharpness in his voice signaled his obvious unease, and feelings stored deeper than his polished politician veneer should allow. 

Barba took no pleasure in thinking that--maybe--nearly losing it all put things into perspective for Alex. He never saw Alex as the kind of man who needed those lessons taught to him so bluntly, so publicly. 

Such was what prompted Barba’s own approach, at the time--quiet consultation, a whispered word of warning, several times over.

That it hadn’t worked was proof enough he didn’t _know_ the kind of man Alex was.

“I was home,” Alex said simply. “You weren’t. I’d hate to think what might have happened, otherwise.”

“I’m sure,” Barba said with a roll of his eyes. Alex may well have been playing at earnest, but Barba was inclined to agree. To not be where he was, with Carisi at his heels and then ultimately by his side--

He was no sentimentalist. Barba could not say for certain whether he’d wish for things to have gone differently for him, to escape some futures and yet still find others. He decided he wouldn’t risk it. 

Alex shrugged; he wouldn’t press the point if Barba had already taken his stand. 

“I’m sure you could use a little good PR, all the same.”

Barba frowned, realizing they were still on the topic of Carisi.

“My work speaks for itself,” Barba said, though he had his doubts that Alex Muñoz would be in any position to sway favor, least of all for him. 

“Which is why you dress like you do,” Alex rattled off _that_ old line. Even in their shared childhood, Barba took pains to dress better than his circumstances should allow. Not in name brand, certainly, but he made do. 

“Armani?” Alex guessed, and wasn’t wrong. “You do a lot. You fight and you win. But it’s never enough, is it? Winning doesn’t change how your bosses look at you. And they never seem surprised to see you fail.” 

Barba knew this speech--Alex had been a rabble rouser even in their youth. He’d tempered all that, kept his true feelings aside only for those he trusted most, and toed a fine line in whistling those terms to those in his community. Barba wanted to remind him there was no vote to be won, now, but such was a line he could not bring himself to cross.

“That will never change,” Alex continued, seemingly undeterred by his own familiar rhetoric. “But those people? They don't matter. Your community matters. People you grew up with, but who don't know what to think of you anymore. You're still in their hearts, Rafi. And I can change their minds.” Towards the former friend he’d maligned in the press and to the very community he raised in his speech alike, Alex managed to look sympathetic. “I could help you.”

It was so pointed an approach, Barba wondered if he'd been the night's true target, and the City Comptroller a mere diversion. 

And despite this--his instinct to suspect a person’s kindly tone and enriched promises--Barba knew he was close to believing Alex’s every word, and sinking back into the man’s rank and file. There, though he’d be comfortable and warmed by the exquisite light held by power and influence, Barba knew he would be consigned to do the man’s bidding, however artfully it was asked of him.

So he held to whatever goodness Carisi claimed to see in him, and that little bit he hoped he sometimes wasn’t just imagining. 

“I can’t forgive you, Alex.” 

And in saying so, Barba felt as though he’d driven a stake not through Alex’s heart, but his own. Alex gave that same, easy smile that had--not moments ago--gathered Barba in. 

_Fooled,_ indeed. 

He clapped Barba on the shoulder, leaned in. 

“Then there’s no helping you, Rafi.”

To his profound embarrassment, Barba felt the sentiment like a threat against his life. He stood there, bearing it, but the second Alex pulled back and away, Barba’s gaze set itself on Carisi, his lifeline. 

As he’d once been, and so would be again.

It was a moment of eerie distraction. Barba saw Carisi waiting for him, and was heartened, despite the sensation he felt cinching his lungs and other assorted organs together, and leaving the rest of his chest cavity feeling hollow. Rarely did the thought find him, now, as to how long that would last. He was confident, maybe more than he should be. Even amidst recent misunderstandings and sparring words, Barba found he’d had to scrounge for genuine doubts. 

Never in question was the fact that Carisi enjoyed Barba’s company, sought it out, and meant to keep himself availed of it. He went at it with a dogged intensity--bringing food, helping with work, or otherwise naming his presence. That kind of persistence frightened Barba, in retrospect, but never in the moment. How long had Carisi been trying to get closer, while Barba narrowed his gaze to only see brown-nosing and petulence? 

Carisi had always liked to be _around._

Barba had always been one to press his luck. 

Why Barba’s mind flung itself towards Carisi in that moment was simple: the things Carisi said--the big-hearted, understatedly immense promises he lobbed easily over paperwork and take-away dinners--were all true. Barba could trust this young man’s most passing word.

Strangely, such an arrangement wasn’t novel. 

He’d once felt that way with Alex.

Upon returning to his table, Barba heard one last passing word from Alex--an explanation, of sorts, to his guest.

“A constituent, says he hopes I run again.”

The urge to roll his eyes was only tempered by the focus trained on him; Barba was--as ever--under Carisi’s watchful stare. 

So he curbed his attitude, and willed himself to return to his evening, pleasant as it had been, before the intrusion of his past like a railroad spike through crusted earth. Barba reached out his hand as he approached--as if he pictured himself skimming water or green, green grass--meeting Carisi’s and tracing it elbow-to-fingertips as he moved to round the table and take his seat.

“I should have gotten you a drink,” Barba realized as he sat. The comment was, at once, a genuine acknowledgement _and_ a way not to discuss the situation itself, focusing instead on a pointless tangent. “That was rude of me. Did you want--?”

“The waiter came by already, with wine.” 

“And you partook,” Barba observed, noting that his glass of wine hadn’t risen any, but Carisi’s had come and gone like the tide.

Barba’s expression was taut with barely-hidden aggravation, Carisi noticed, which drained him fast of sympathy, and only left the younger man feeling ashamed. He should have been something for Barba, a ready presence whether that much was wanted of him or not. Likewise, Carisi wanted to ask after the conversation, but Barba already had his face primed in an air-tight smile, and Carisi knew details would not be forthcoming. 

“So he’s just got that dumb grin on his face, like, all the time?” As a result of the wine or the evening’s awkward turn, Carisi delved into the dense comfort of his Staten Island accent. 

“He made a joke.” 

“What, his first?” 

Barba wanted to smile broadly and genuinely at that, but the effort was already spent just reminding himself to even try. 

“They’re not bad people,” Barba said. He wanted to cling to the fantasy of all Alex had offered him--that he could still have a place among those from their community, people who had done great things, and were recognized not as defectors, but alumni--even for just a second longer than he’d considered it.

“Raf.” Carisi leveled with him from across the table, even dipping his head low to search out Barba’s downcast gaze. “You don’t need me telling you what he is.”

Barba looked up, surprised by the steel in Carisi’s voice. He’d forgotten the man had worn blue--shades upon shades of it. Dark blues colored his suit, and darker ones still nestled themselves against the procession of horizontal lines in his tie. His shirt was bright in comparison, shades lighter than the man’s eyes, but all swimming in the same cool family.

Barba was a hodgepodge of greys, pinks, reds, and orange. He was nothing calm or soothing, neither in person nor in dress. He supposed he wished he were, if only to settle Carisi’s nerves, to pivot him from upset or drink or tired and worn arguments.

Barba felt his face grow warm. He was embarrassed to have even been open to the possibility of being taken in again, and so easily. That he’d sooner hang himself on an absently kind word from Alex than trust his own judgement--or Carisi’s, for that matter--made him feel ill.

Barba hated any conscious effort towards the recovery and maintenance of his pride, as if it should be so obvious he’d taken a swipe at it himself. He hated more the concept that Carisi should struggle for dignity, but--

He could not relent. He could not give an apology when he’d just bitten his tongue to blood trying to avoid one. So Barba settled on some abstract truth.

He said, “I’m getting a migraine.”

It wasn’t quite a lie, but its worth laid far enough elsewhere that the sentiment itself lost meaning.

“Yeah,” Carisi said, because he’d heard Barba plainly: _Can we go?_

They attempted to finish their meals--in Carisi’s case, his wine--and Barba signaled for a waiter. His card appeared in no time, and was whisked away, leaving Carisi going uselessly for his wallet.

“But--”

“We were never going to split the bill.”

It was a thing, given a lighter heart, Barba would have said kindly, teasingly. He’d have watched Carisi smile and go pink, then make some goofy overture as to how he could _possibly_ repay the gesture. 

Instead, Barba’s words were clipped and direct. If Carisi did go pink in response, it wasn’t for flattered feelings and impure thoughts towards the latter half of their evening. 

He was embarrassed, and the wounded look he wore was driven by the end of Barba’s sword.

As they left, Carisi glanced back towards the Munoz’s table, only to find Yelina, hair drawn back behind her ear, staring. 

He summoned up a noncommittal smile, and thought she could take it anyway she chose. 

_No hard feelings,_ because Barba certainly could not hold any against Yelina, and even his attempts against Alex were meager. 

Or, _That’s right._

_He’s mine._

Because maybe they’d been embarrassed and were being driven out into the cold, and undoubtedly, this was a blow to both their egos, but Carisi was leaving with the better man. 

Outside, the snowfall seemed to hover about their eyes and never quite reach the earth. It was beautifully eerie, and in moments before their feet clapped the sidewalk, Barba was sure he heard utter silence. 

“Sorry,” Barba said, though his tone was absent any warmth. His nerves had that effect on him, now--turning him cold well before any frigid temperatures took that honor. 

_His_ nerves, Barba decided. Not Alex.

He tried again. 

“I’m sorry about that.” 

He heard the fraying the ends of his own voice, and hated that the evening had worn him ragged already, well before Carisi got the chance.

“Sonny--”

“Me too,” Carisi interrupted, and together they stalled on the sidewalk, Carisi having taken a long-legged step ahead, turned, and faced Barba resolutely. “I’m sorry he showed up, and got you riled. I don’t blame you for anything. It just sucks.” 

Barba’s eyes went wide and his lips parted. He recalled the forgiveness he’d felt at once, but languished over sharing, and here was given a masterclass on how to give of oneself without overwrought consideration. Carisi did not concern himself with all that had stunted Barba’s response--the implications, the shift of power, the weight a gift heaved onto its recipient. 

Yet--Barba felt it deep in his knees. 

And he was struck with a memory, not from their time together, but long before. He found he did not even have to scramble for it, though so much had mounted--glorious, golden, and fine--in recent months, years. He saw Carisi, thanking him for his guidance and help, though they both knew anything Carisi had he’d skimmed and taken piecemeal, because Barba never resoundly offered it up. 

He remembered the conversation, forced at first into a moment of some discomfort as they awaited a fooled jury’s thoughtless verdict. In retrospect, Barba supposed Carisi thought to make the most of every moment they shared, hence his incessant talking, his questions, his staring. He did not think he would ever have the opportunity to linger there, in Barba’s presence, wanted or not.

_I admire your, uh--_

_Suicidal streak?_

The memory--much like the moment itself--left Barba stunned, and deeply touched.

Admiration, forgiveness, and thanks. It was a hand Carisi often played--his favorite, always a winner. 

(Barba had not let himself lose often enough to learn to be gracious about it.)

“Thanks for dinner,” Carisi added, and another smooth turn found his hand slipping into Barba’s, their fingers interlocking without a moment’s waste. 

Barba’s headache followed him home, and for a time he thought it was a thing he’d stirred up within himself, out of spite for whatever happiness he’d accrued, perhaps, or else the simple cosmic sense that he should pay dearly for it. But after the headache struck, a fever soon followed, and all the features of a terrible flu were born out instead. 

It was vindication--of a kind--so he was not so unhappy for it. 

Specifically, because the end result would be a quiet weekend at his place, with Carisi plying him with liquids and Tamiflu. Even the sudden contention of aches and pains could not overwhelm what he’d finally availed himself to see: the very adoration he claimed to exist, but worried wasn’t there. It was there, _in abundance,_ and so expansive that even Carisi could not hold all of it in tight. Some aspects still escaped him, and others he’d have to let go of entirely. 

Barba told him as much in quiet, furtive tones, while Carisi laughed nervously and blamed the loopy, love-lorn proclamations on a heady cocktail of medications.

But at some point Saturday night, after kicking off the sheets and then bemoaning the subsequent chill, Barba insisted. Tired and out of it, he staked claim after claim for Carisi’s whole heart, retracing every argument Carisi himself had made, and drew from them a simple conclusion. 

“And maybe that’s not how you love everyone, but it’s how you’ll love me.”

And to feel embarrassed for naming a thing so real it was tangible--truthfully, Barba was disappointed in himself. Reason stood that the throbbing in his head and fever in his veins made the acknowledgement feel that much more heady and painstaking, when in truth it was plain and unremarkable, but Barba did not feel it that way, and _could not_ will himself to feel otherwise. He met those terms with sweat in his eyes and bile on his tongue. He said them to the sweet-and-sorry face connected to the cool hand cradling his face. 

(A _deft hand,_ too, at undoing buttons, and smoothing sheets, and untangling apologies from the delirium that masked them.)

Carisi stroked his hair and made unhappy noises after the heat radiating from Barba’s brow. 

“Yeah, I will.”

-

Time away from Barba--both by Barba’s instruction and then Carisi’s self-quarantining against the man’s flu--felt like an anxious year leading to a blessed summer. It was three days now, and Carisi was hungry for having _everything_ again, not simply piecemeal dinners and visits when their schedules allowed. 

He wanted to move soundlessly through time, progressing so far as to reach that fantastically plain end: domesticity. Routine. Familiarity. 

Carisi had made his way there, before, chewing back and spitting out pieces of Barba’s name until the honorifics were long-gone, with professionalism chasing quickly after. 

_Counselor. Barba. Raf._

Never _Rafael,_ like Yelina had said it--all supple, a kiss on every vowel, and bated breath that held at the last of it. Like music, an old song she could hum along with now, though the words escaped her. 

It was worlds away from the caustic _Raf_ Carisi employed. Even as sweetly as he tried, there was no getting his wide mouth around those delicate sounds. 

His was a tugboat to Yelina’s gondola; he bobbed like a dingy on the water, while she sailed soundly by.

 _“Rafael,”_ he tried, just once, under his breath as he cleared the elevator doors. 

Feeling sore after his lover’s name spelled out beautifully in the mouths of others was a moot point; it was Carisi letting himself into the man’s apartment, not Yelina or Alex. 

He’d been by earlier that morning, arms laden with pastries and juice. When he entered and stripped himself of his coat, suit jacket, and various hardware--as ever, his sidearm went into a drawer--Carisi sampled some of the leftover fare before crossing into the living room to better greet Barba.

“You look awful,” he blurted out, failing spectacularly. Barba was upright, at least, which was an improvement. Instead of strewn face-down in bed, his breathing more a perpetual groan than not, he lounged on the couch, reading emails on his phone, and sipping ginger ale when his stomach allowed it. 

“Excuse you, I’ve lost four pounds.” 

“How are you feeling?” 

Carisi sat opposite of Barba on a recliner, but extended an arm into the space between them, and laid the hand on Barba’s forehead. 

Barba instinctively drew away from the motherly--though surely never _his_ mother--touch, but caught hold of Carisi’s wrist, and wrapped his fingers securely over the soft skin there. He felt a pulse he knew as well as his own, and smiled up at the man to whom it belonged. Carisi’s tie was loosened, another in his spectrum of blue. His lips were chapped red from the cold, his cheeks and ears pink. The beautiful medley of colors found Barba well, and he sat up a little straighter, his body rising like a vine to meet this perpetual source of light. 

“Better, actually.” 

Carisi missed his meaning. 

“Yeah, well, reflexes don’t count. You’re not Spider Man.” Carisi narrowed his eyes in search of Barba's less obvious ailments. “How are your glands?”

Barba gave up on being coy. He said, tauntingly, “Have at them, stud.”

He saw the interest register in the leap Carisi’s brows took to his hairline, but as they settled so too did Carisi. He sank back, his expression a mottled combination of want and unease.

“I don’t want to get sick.” 

Barba raised his chin towards the kitchen, indicating the assorted breakfast foods Carisi brought over, in addition to a far-less-appealing liquid diet for Barba. 

“You just ate an eight-hour-old sausage. You’re already flirting with danger.”

“Hey, those are from an honest-to-God Italian bakery. They’ve got staying power.” 

Carisi thought about going for another just to prove his point, but Barba still had a grip on his wrist, and Carisi didn’t want to slip away more than he wanted processed meats and to double down on a claim.

And, to prove _his_ point, Barba began to drag his thumb in slow circles at the base of Carisi’s palm, where the skin was sensitive to his efforts, and Carisi--already rattled--was likewise taken with the cause. 

“I don’t think I’m contagious anymore.”

“You’re delirious,” Carisi countered, and tugged his arm--not very hard, but Barba let it go all the same, just to see for himself that Carisi looked disappointed by the loss of contact. 

“We don’t even have to kiss.”

Carisi flushed at the implication. 

“I can’t get started and _not_ kiss you.”

“Try,” Barba challenged. “Or let me suck you off, and we’ll part with a gentlemanly handshake.” 

“There is _nothing_ gentlemanly about your mouth,” Carisi said, and trailed it with a nervous chuckle. For being sick for three days, Barba looked good--comely, unshaven, hair a clean but uncombed mess. Carisi had seen Barba in more t-shirt-and-sweats combinations in the last few days than in the last year combined, and something about the heather grey raglan sleeve top and dark green joggers--now tenting--was strangely intoxicating. There were bare feet to match, and Carisi imagined the scrape of a rough heel against the backs of his thighs--a common occurrence when Carisi topped, and Barba clamored for closeness. 

Carisi felt his throat go dry, and wet his lips to little avail.

Barba took him by the wrist again, and easily reined him in, like gathering slack from a rope. Before Carisi knew better, he was in Barba’s lap, his added weight sinking Barba into the couch. At once, Carisi got his hands into Barba’s hair, thinking he ought not let the opportunity go to waste. 

“Mmm--”

Barba interrupted himself with a sputtering cough, the lone result of his trying to speak with his mouth shut, which was--presently--his only means of breathing.

Carisi reared back. “Oh, come on, _no._ You can’t even breathe out of your nose, you’re so stuffed up. What if you choke and--?”

“Choke and die on your cock, are you serious? That’s how you think I’ll go?” Barba took a handful of Carisi’s ass and squeezed--punishment, of a kind. “After-- _everything,_ that’s what you think it’ll come down to?”

“I mean, if we’re lucky,” Carisi reasoned, smiling goofily. “It’d be how you’d want to go out, right? Doing what you love?”

That earned him a swat on the ass and Barba’s other hand coming up to his shoulder, and knocking him sideways onto the empty stretch of couch to Barba’s right.

“Off--of--me--” Barba insisted, and wasn’t satisfied until Carisi was a sprawling mess, parts of him resting on the couch, the floor, and Barba himself. “You’ve sufficiently killed the mood.” 

Stilling grinning over the display, Carisi taunted back, “Yeah, well, your breath smells weird, anyway.”

“I drank half a gallon of that juice,” Barba snapped. His pride was hurt, now, by his own coughing fit and Carisi’s waning interest in fooling around with him. “Fourteen freshly squeezed oranges, inside of _me,_ for _you.”_

“Yeah, you getting better is for my benefit, only.”

Carisi got himself situated on the couch, even drawing up his feet and landing them in Barba’s lap. Barba made a face at the completely dull black dress socks. There was nary a stripe, zig-zag, or polka-dot to be found. 

And worse, the fabric was _pilling._

“You know, I’ve got the day off tomorrow--we could sleep late. I could make soup.” Carisi prattled on with half-formed ideas to keep Barba at home, in bed, that circled around--but did not touch--the most obvious and winning ploy. Carisi sighed, and asked, “You’re going back to work tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“Without a single doubt,” Barba said. “How you talked me into taking two days off already…” 

Barba tugged one sock off, then the other. He balled them up and hurled them in the vague direction of his open bedroom door, where he kept a hamper. 

“...People must think I’m dead.”

Barba didn’t catch himself in time--he let the comment fly, the imagery stand. It composed itself like a corpse right there on the coffee table ahead of them, amidst saltine crumbs and a half-empty box of tissues. Its odor filled the room, clouded both mens’ vision and stung at the corners of their eyes. 

Barba regretted it at once, but did not know the words to abolish the scene. 

Was he to apologize? To whom? To Carisi, who was surely hurt by the idea, but only so much as in the abstract--as he sensed the pain Barba must feel, taking that odd step out of composure, and falling flat on his face for it?

Apologizing to _himself_ seemed like something his therapist would recommend. Barba put a pin in it, supposing it was just as well that he bring something to his sessions, instead of beginning the hour with a declaration of how **_fine,_** really, it’s been over a year he was, and having Dr. Bloom suss out some doubt and prove him wrong. 

Though Barba felt he’d languished over the faux paux for minutes, Carisi came in quick, not a second later, with something to make Barba smile, make him forget.

It started with a chaste kiss on the cheek.

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” he said, lips still drawn over Barba’s sick-warmed skin. “If you _really_ want to, you can suck my cock.”

Barba snorted, then started coughing again. Only when the moment finally quieted did he thank Carisi for the _tremendously_ kind offer. 

-

Humiliation held a new place in Barba’s heart. He figured he ought to have a better tolerance for it, or else have built up some immunity, but no. Every reappearance felt as formidable as the first, bringing a rush of adrenaline to his brain, color to his cheeks, and tears to his eyes.

Though, much of that was due to his coughing fit.

It began as a tickle in his throat, then blossomed into something unmanageable as the defense attorney--clearly flustered by the display--spoke out on behalf of his client, one of those _strong-ties-to-the-community_ type of criminal with which New York seemed to be inundated. 

“Your Honor!” 

“Mr. Barba--”

Barba shook his head at whatever it was the defense attorney and the judge were acknowledging--aggravation, certainly, but also pity. Another rattling cough took him, this one deep and unremitting. His whole body bent slightly towards an effort to expel it, and Barba knew his face was well enough red for that, anyway. 

The intricately folded silk pocket square was already relieved of his breast pocket and half-soaked now with spittle and breath, its white-and-green baby’s breath pattern a mottled mess. What _more_ did they want from him?

Some in the gallery were laughing at the absurdity of a prosecutor’s terrible cough interrupting every other word uttered by the defense. And some-- _one_ \--had a kinder response.

Barba felt a hand on his upper arm--an intimate touch, nothing like an annoyed stranger’s tap on the shoulder. _Someone taking liberties,_ he supposed, or else--

Somehow, Barba wasn’t surprised to see Carisi behind him, dressed down for his day off. Paired with his jeans and a surprisingly stylish peacoat was an unimpressed little quirk of a smile--he’d _said_ Barba needed more time to ward off the worst of his illness--and an offering. 

Hot tea, of all things, in a styrofoam cup. 

Carisi sort of shrugged-- _sorry, you brought this upon yourself_ \--and pressed the drink into Barba’s grip. He did not linger or announce himself, mindful of his place in relation to Barba’s. 

Before breaking contact, however, Carisi produced a roll of throat lozenges from his pocket. Barba narrowed his eyes and for the briefest of moments, Carisi wondered if a wink was imminent. 

The thought found Barba again that Carisi must think he was _so impossibly cute._

And _goddamnit,_ he was.

But Barba refrained, passing on the lozenges with a smart look, figuring it for a kind of gateway comfort. It would be a short step from there to Carisi bringing him a hot water bottle and handknitted throw.

He turned away, and Carisi took his place back in the gallery crowd. 

The first sip of tea was soothing--the second, moreso. Barba managed to see through to the end of the hearing with only a rumbled fit puffing out his cheeks and testing the patience of the court.

Despite his poor showing, he made a worthy case for remand. 

With the matter soon dismissed, Barba made a point to apologize to the judge before she returned to her chambers. It was a small infraction, only, but still Barba thought his willpower should have stifled his very organs.

He’d known Judge Elana Barth at Harvard--she graduated a year earlier than he, but they ran in similar circles, shared a few mutual friends. 

They attended the same Halloween party, once. 

If Barth remembered Barba’s expert and skin-tight Freddie Mercury get-up, she didn’t let on. Barba supposed that was the kindness he was afforded, given that he _certainly_ remembered an unplanned viewing of Barth and her then-girlfriend--now _wife_ \--Jennifer Schwartz making the most of a none-too-private study room on the second floor of the HLS Library at three in the morning on a Tuesday. 

(They’d made a beeline for the couch, and not noticed the dozing figure slouched at the table amidst piles of congressional caselaw. Neither party had ever once spoken about it, but Barba’s quiet apology, the gathering of his belongings into his backpack, and his racing shamefaced out of the room was nigh unforgettable.)

Barba gave his present apology with a tight, wry smile.

Judge Barth met it with one of her own. 

“Were it in my power, I’d grant a commendation to our good samaritan, there.”

“No need, your Honor. That’s my partner.” Barba smirked and raised his tea. “This is inclusive.” 

“Huh,” Barth pronounced, and reflected on the handsome man she’d seen lean over the partition, bump Barba’s arm, and lend him favor. “From the gossip, one might be under the impression you were dating a toddler.” 

Barba reminded himself how good he looked when not taking offense. He remarked that-- _surely_ \--such a statement could only stand for Carisi in comparison to Barba himself, adding, “Wizened and old as I am.” 

Barba again drank his tea. Carisi made it fragrant and sweet--a staunch left-turn from how Barba took his coffee, though he supposed they held different functions, and did not mind the soothing kiss of honey in each sip. 

“People can think what they want,” he decided, and Judge Barth promptly barked a laugh.

“I don’t believe for one second you aren’t making a list right now.”

“Care to name names?” 

“Oh,” Barth said, dismissive. It was one thing to gossip, but to gossip as a judge with a prosecutor was unheard of. “The usual suspects.”

“Shock of a lifetime,” Barba said, hiding another smirk against the lip of his cup. “Tell Jennifer I said hello.” 

“She's accepting hellos for two, now.”

Barba's eyebrows leapt to his hairline, and he chased them with a smile. 

“Congratulations.” 

Barth departed--her great, dower robes doing nothing to hide the amusement written all over her face.

Barba gathered his briefing papers and casework, slotted them into his tidy black case, and took his leave of the courtroom. He did not notice--much less care for--the pair of loafers snapping at his heels. 

“Well that was just _darling.”_

Barba blinked, but kept his long-legged stride, forcing the defense attorney to hustle along after him. 

“Do you have a plea to go with that compliment?” he asked, turning neatly on his heel to press for his floor in the elevator. It was either grace or luck--or a combination of the two--that kept the styrofoam cup’s contents from sloshing out and burning his hand, thus allowing Barba to cut an impressive figure, more suave and sure in himself than one would venture to guess, given his display in the courtroom not moments ago.

“Bringing--that. In here.” The attorney threw his head back, squared his shoulders, and supposed he looked tough, doing so. “You should be ashamed.”

Barba didn’t so much as bat an eyelash; he wasn’t surprised--this, from Counselor Spencer Reevely, who had the name recognition of his older sister, but none of the talent. The young man was thin-skinned and short-tempered, and more like those questionable characters he represented than not. He dressed like a dandy and took undo offense to anyone who pointed that out, by compliment or otherwise. He was young, white, and impressionable. It was coming around again that he should be stuffy and prim in his thinking--reason enough that he’d never be the strategic wunderkind his sister was, but reason, too, that he would be a _colossal dick about it._

It seemed only natural that he would also have an ear out for gossip, and know any about Barba.

“You should be a better defense attorney,” Barba said, his throat now suddenly, blissfully clear in its delivery of the idle insult. “Work a little for that extortionate premium you charge with your sister’s reputation.”

“What did you say to me?”

There was a quiet ferocity to Reevely’s words. The memory of the last time someone had taken that tone with his in an elevator found Barba fast, but he held his ground, dismissed any similarities as his own latent paranoia. 

He did what he was best at, what thrilled him to be counted among his natural talents and learned expertise: measuring the mettle of an opponent, cutting right to it, and watching the human halves _split apart._

“Which is the greater insult to this profession? My existence or your utter incompetence?” Barba looked Reevely over, then sipped his tea. The elevator opened to his floor, but Barba only stepped a toe out of place, deciding to take pity on the man. 

“There’s still a plea to be had. If you can cop to it in two hours, I won’t wipe the floor with you in court.” He reasoned, then, that Reevely was about Carisi’s age. No sense in treating a man like a child. 

“One hour,” he amended, a smirk tugging at one side of his mouth as he did. “I think I’d like you to make that dumbfounded face before a jury.”

With that, Barba strode away, and the elevator doors closed on a red-faced, gawking Counselor Reevely.

Barba returned to his office, tea still in hand. Against the back of his head he felt a curious look from Carmen; either she figured him for being angry that he was drinking tea, or he had some other reason, grounds on which she shouldn’t engage with him, anyway.

He sat, and because the styrofoam cup was still warm in his hands, he absently took another sip. By the time he put his mind to his work and spread before him a wealth of paperwork, the cup was on the far end of his desk, cold. 

Even amidst crime scene photos, the cup drew his eye. 

He wondered after how easy it is for Carisi to enter every vestige of his life, and how willing Barba was to see him through.

He was pleased with himself, in truth. For choosing right, choosing Carisi. He swept away the details that would only discolor his rosy view of how it all came to be, but the sentiments they posed in form held true.

Keeping him would be the only true hardship. Barba imagined a lifetime of work in that respect.

In the short term, keeping him away was proving to be a hassle, as Carisi let himself into Barba office, a large brown paper bag in hand.

“Hey. I got soup.”

Barba supposed he should have swept an arm across his desk, scattering files and notes to the floor, for all he was set not to accomplish that afternoon. He stood instead, stretched, and followed Carisi to the round table at the center of his office, where Carisi was already unloading piping hot containers.

“You’re really making the most of your day off, huh?”

“Yeah, well--if you’d actually let yourself get better, I wouldn’t have to chase after you, thinkin’ you might keel over.” 

“I wouldn’t _keel._ ” 

“You got, like, no equilibrium,” Carisi said, setting plastic spoons atop napkins with all the formality of setting the table for a Sunday night supper. “You probably barfed it up.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

Barba folded his arms across his chest, jutted out a hip. He was comfortable, now, just watching the scene. Carisi looked up at him, feeling self-conscious with the attention.

“Carrot ginger, right?”

“Yes. Thank you.” Barba took a seat at the table, and Carisi joined him. “For the tea, also.”

“That was okay?” Carisi asked, suddenly nervous. Nevermind that he’d gone and done the thing, anyway; he seemed to reserve his concern for Barba’s inevitable response to it. “You just sounded _awful--_ ” 

“It was fine.” _More than._ “It was very sweet.”

“The tea?”

Barba smirked as if to say, _Lord help, aren’t you cute? Of course you know better._ But Carisi--who was in this moment as wholesome, dear, and genuine as Barba ever teased him of being--did not. 

“You were sweet,” Barba clarified. “The tea was acceptable.” His mouth twitched as he considered--briefly--saying nothing more, but ego got the better of him, and Barba started in: “Opposing counsel didn’t think so, but that guy’s a dick with a trust fund and the law degree he bought with it.”

The sneer twisting Barba’s mouth was replaced by a wry smile. 

“It doesn’t happen as much as you’d think,” he added, since the concerned look on Carisi’s face suggested he meant to ask exactly that. 

Barba didn’t know if he _wanted_ to talk about the exchange with Spencer Reevely, or if he was simply disappointed no one else had been around to hear him get the better of the man. He worried, too, that if Carisi asked and Barba answered, he’d paint himself as the bully, demanding plea deals and lobbing insults in the same breath. 

Carisi waited, expecting Barba to have more to say, to have a point. A mind towards action, a way to remedy this. Maybe he was even a little fearful of that. Barba didn’t blame him--a remedy, a _true remedy_ for the occasional snide comments and knowing looks, would be very simple. He’d tried it, once.

These were his own problems, as far as Barba was concerned. If his therapist was worth half of what he paid her, Barba didn’t doubt she had her suspicions after all the things he obfuscated in their talks, the way he painted a life for her that was somehow largely untouched by supporting characters--there were villians and heros, and Barba alone went unnamed in the mix. 

He chose to sequester these microaggressions as often as possible, to suffocate them of breathing room and sunlight, knowing all the while if some lowlife defense attorney summons words enough to say to his face, there’s no telling what’s being bandied about behind closed doors. What insults part the lips of his bosses, and would he ever hear them, second hand or otherwise?

The prospect was daunting, and Barba knew better than to dwell on it, certain any concerns would read across his face, and Carisi would shrink back, or worse--lean forward and ask, open-hearted, about what could be done.

And then he’d steel himself for the inevitable blow. 

So Barba smiled, easy and sure. He even let his eyes in on the effort, relaxing his furrowed brow and letting them close--slightly--as if the sight he’d set them upon was too bright. 

It didn’t seem to help the situation.

Carisi feared secrets in every iteration. Secrets Barba was keeping from him, secrets by abstraction, by omission, by default. He wanted at once to clear the air, to speak to every doubt they may share between them, because he’d done some sleuthing, made a list, and wanted to check off one after another on his list. Little things, all. 

But Carisi did not breathe a word into that suggestion, dreading the possibility that Barba might surprise him. 

He’d done it before. 

“You oughta take the rest of the day off,” Carisi said. “Sleep. Take some more medication. You could probably even knock this thing out, finally--”

“Okay.”

“--if you’d just--oh. Okay?”

 _In for a penny,_ Barba thought.

“I’ll take the day, go home. If you’re offering to join me.”

Carisi grinned at that and gamely answered in the affirmative: “Well, _yeah._ ”

“Can we eat, first?” 

The setting was made all the more pleasant with Carisi’s intermittent talking in low, warm tones about FaceTiming with his sister and her child--the details of which Barba blanked on, satisfied as he was with only the rambling sounds. A thought drew itself, longhand, into his mind, and Barba voiced it well before he have it accompanying consideration.

“There’s so much grey in your hair.”

Carisi choked on his spoonful of minestrone, then rasped out, “Uh, unless you found some in your soup, I’m not clamoring for an update, there.”

A grin spread wide across Barba’s face.

“Are you embarrassed?” Barba watched Carisi's nimble fingers agitate the swept back hair above his ears. The worst of it, if indeed Carisi thought about it in those terms. 

“I’m thirty-one. So, yes.”

“You shouldn’t be. It suits you.”

“Okay, well, here’s a tip for your next compliment: There’s _just the right amount_ of grey in your hair, Sonny. The grey--which looks good--in your hair, is proportional to the fundamental stress of your job, life, mortal soul, _et cetera.”_

“What's going on with your mortal soul?” Barba asked this lightly, as if he thought to fool Carisi into answering him. He watched Carisi open and shut his mouth--lulled into his trap, but quick to see the dangers waiting therein. 

With only a look, Barba pressed for an answer. 

“I know I’m a broken record with this, but, my parents.” Carisi leaned back in his chair, as if even inches of distance afforded him a wider perspective, “We’ve been talking and… do you want to hear this?”

“You’re obviously bursting to tell me,” Barba hummed, and if his tone was as unkind as he imagined it to be, that did not reflect on Carisi's face, hearing it. Nonetheless, he softened. “If it’s bothering you, yes. I want it hear it. Proceed.”

Carisi took a breath and started in. He covered the usual fare with his parents, but noted happily that Bella was getting their sisters in line, and he and Barba could expect better behavior in the future. 

Barba bit his tongue, there, and did not state the obvious: _It’s not like I have a long memory… or self-respect._

Barba chose not to interject to ask after specifics, or argue, or reason his way clear of any potentially disastrous meetups. He just listened, let Carisi talk himself towards calm and quiet. 

The more Carisi spoke--the deeper he crawled into his own heart and kicked back the flesh and threaded muscle he unearthed on his way--the less Barba heard about Carisi’s _parents._ It was Kitty-- _Ma_ \--who stood out.

Barba found that curious. Carisi’s father either did not make such a show of his discomfort, or he simply did not feel much to that effect. Barba--like Carisi--knew a mother’s denials and bargaining. 

He did not know a father’s restraint. 

The term itself, however plain to the naked ear, spoke quietly of love and respect. 

Barba did not know those, either. 

It gnawed at him--that lack of understanding. That there should be detailing in some reality he could never quite glean, for reason as needless as poor eyesight, and his whole self was somehow lacking for the experience. 

It was only when Carisi had talked himself silent that Barba posed the following question: “May I ask… What deceit does she think was leveled at your birth? What promise haven’t you fulfilled?” 

Wide-eyed and dumbfounded, Carisi looked as though he did not understand the question, so Barba clarified: “You’re successful, you’re honest, you’re good-natured--and healthy, besides. What else does she expect of you?” 

_The world,_ was what Carisi wanted to answer. That’s what it felt like, some days. 

“Are you projecting here, or…”

“I’m deathly serious,” Barba replied flatly. “Ask her. Where have you failed? Because if it’s nothing but superficial ideals about how she thinks you can live with yourself, Sonny, she won’t have anything to say.” 

_Projecting_ was more-or-less right, Barba realized, though he preferred to think of it as speaking from a wealth of experience. 

“I just wish you’d let it go.” 

It was a tall order, and Carisi called him on it.

“What my mom thinks of me? And how about I give up the laws of physics for, like, lent.” 

“What I’m saying is, if she’s going to disappoint you, let her. Feel that much. Don’t appease her by thinking there’s a method to her madness. Okay? Sometimes people let you down.” 

Carisi fell quiet. The thoughts were a heavy addition to their meal, and though they’d parted Barba’s lips, Carisi felt them stall in his own throat, like he wanted to echo them back, practice the terms before attempting their application. 

They stalled--or else, Carisi hadn’t wanted to try them, anyway.

“I know you want better for me,” he said quietly. “Thing is, I want better for her.” 

“That’s a kind gesture, but--” Barba stalled. 

_Drop it,_ he told himself, and fought to be kinder, to let Carisi choose his own course of action without Barba making him feel like the choice was less-than. Like he was settling. 

“All the added stress? It’s going to give you grey hair.” 

Carisi smiled at that. The look was sweet and shy, and Barba felt like preening, knowing he’d put it there. 

Finally, Carisi relaxed. His shoulders sloped and he rolled his neck back comfortably, then reclined in the chair he’d pulled closer to Barba’s at his office table. He let the heart of Barba’s argument find him again, its passage easier with the touch of humor and kindness Barba knew now to incorporate; Carisi wasn’t a selection of faces he’d never see again--his arguments didn’t have to be so purist, here. They could fluctuate, shrinking and growing in tandem with Carisi’s availability to Barba’s words, his inclination to know better, or simply know otherwise. 

And all this, because Carisi saw the man sitting before him as someone grounded and strong. Someone who _knew_ himself, even coming from a place of denial or shunted acceptance. Despite all his conditional statements and disclaimers, Carisi saw in Barba a mentor, much in the way Barba had oft purported not to be professionally.

Carisi refused his refusals; he saw a scholar of the human condition. 

All the same, Carisi’s smile drew itself into a pout, and he dragged his spoon around in his soup. 

“It’s gonna look like Jay Leno.”

“What?” Barba frowned at the inexplicable left turn in their conversation. “Or--who?”

“See, that’s the right answer. Who is Jay Leno? But when all _this,_ ” Carisi gestured with his free hand to both sides of his head, spidering his large hand to truly grasp the scope of what he faced, “Goes grey, and some little bit on top stays darker, people are gonna see nothin’ else, they’re gonna think, ‘lower-tier late night talk show host who overstayed his welcome.’” 

“It just rolls off the tongue,” Barba teased. He didn’t mind the prospect, though, because Carisi’s very presentation of the vision held on the particulars of _time_ \--years into the future. Decades, maybe. And he spoke to these odds as though in warning. 

Barba should know what he was getting himself into. 

“No one’s going to admit to watching Jay Leno,” Barba said kindly.

“Ah, but, see--now you know exactly who I’m talking about.” 

“It’s not going to go like that,” Barba insisted, and stared thoughtfully at the coif of hair Carisi kept so neat. “I’ve already been through so much.”

“Asshole,” Carisi said, but was grinning sheepishly. 

Barba didn’t deny it. _Couldn’t,_ now, because despite his best efforts, he was back to his old tricks--prying for answers in a moment of weakness.

“What you said at dinner the other night…” Barba started slow, as if at any moment he could veer off from his obvious destination. It wasn’t genuine, but it held Carisi’s attention, his breath. “About going to your place, _feeling okay_ about _being someplace else sometimes._ ”

Carisi winced in preparation. That Barba was quoting him did not bode well for any and all defenses Carisi might mount.

“I misread you the first time. Perhaps--I got ahead of myself. So. Was that an awkwardly worded question about my mental health?” Barba's gaze flitted to meet Carisi's and then nosedive back to his meal. “Because I don’t know that I appreciate that.”

It _was,_ if only because Carisi knew that Barba still attended therapy, a paltry fact the likes of which was _all_ he knew. Any attempted discussion of his sessions dropped off like a cliff. 

“I ask you if you’re okay all the time,” Carisi said--a weak defense, but he hadn’t expected Barba to really take issue with something he’d flubbed, anyway. 

“And I lie to you,” Barba said, eyes still downcast. “I thought that was our thing.”

“Raf.” Carisi cocked his head, leaned forward with one arm resting on the table, looking for all the world like he meant to set terms to a deal. (Barba wondered if he should be concerned about that.) “I’ll level with you. I don’t know how to ask how you’re doing, and sometimes I don’t trust myself to see it. Because you seem pretty happy at your place, but that doesn’t follow you everywhere. And like you said--you, uh, obfuscate.”

Care and concern folded themselves into every syllable, softening even what Barba perceived to be unfounded. Those soft tones were tangible enough that Barba could have plucked them from the air, worn them like clothes. 

So when Barba played the idle contrarian all the same, his heart wasn’t in it. 

“You wanted to run a few tests, then? See how I fare in unknown environments? I’m doing better. Really.” Bristling at the implication that maybe he _wasn’t,_ or at the very least Carisi wasn’t sure, Barba added tersely, “And I didn’t know I was keeping it a secret.” 

Carisi huffed a rueful laugh. 

“Just now, what you said about that Doogie Howser-looking defense attorney--”

“You’re one to talk--”

“--that stuff really bothers you.” Carisi dropped his gaze and raised his long arms to fold across his chest--altogether, a move to shield himself against a chill Barba himself did not feel. “And that’s on me, too.”

Barba’s heart sank. That was precisely the interpretation of events he meant to avoid, and worse--he knew Carisi’s view was not wholly unfounded. The evidence was cemented in Barba’s own memory, where the attack on his life left him shaken and angry, and he’d lashed out at everyone who came to his aid. Carisi and Benson bore the worst of it, taking his spitting insults like buckshot.

“Sonny. It’s really not. _Any of it._ ” 

Carisi nodded absently along, doubting the denial but not willing to take Barba up on an argument.

“I just feel like you’re overdue for some… post-near-death excursions into risky behaviors.”

“Well, there’s you, for starters,” Barba teased, but then felt a pang of shame for his obvious neglect. “I feel like an idiot for not asking--how are _you_ doing?”

“Come on, no.” Carisi rolled his eyes. “Like I’m subtle about it.” 

But Barba waited, his silence a ballooning presence between them that Carisi had to either acknowledge or burst apart. 

“It’s… I’ve been…” When Carisi fidgeted, it was a whole-body affair. His gaze found previously unknown corners of the room, and the motions that swept up his fingers and wrists were not unlike those of a fish, torn from the water and left flailing on land. 

_“You’re like law school.”_

Barba raised an eyebrow. 

“If you’re about to call me tedious, uncompromising, and musty…”

Carisi was already shaking his head and searching his own heart for a better explanation. 

“I’m learning a lot. I’m--I’m _really trying._ Sometimes I embarrass myself,” Carisi gave an awkward smile, there. “My friends want me to ditch and hang out and my parents don’t know what I’m in it for but--” Carisi stopped, took a breath. “But I _know._ I know it’s worthwhile.”

Barba felt like a pushover for thinking the response to be charming and sweet, but even chastising himself for it did not stifle the warmth blooming throughout his chest. 

Waiting for those feelings to subside was a doomed task. It was as though he’d happened on a placid lake, and thought the thing the product of floodwaters. But he could stand at those shores and watch the water rise or recede, but never drain away. In that sense, it was bottomless.

The word “lovesick” arrived in his mind, and Barba was unable to shake it. 

“I suppose that begs to question of payoff,” Barba said, cooler than he liked, but Carisi’s small smile warmed him back up.

“Yeah, well,” he shrugged. “I guess I’m playing the odds on both you _and_ the law degree.”

“And here I thought I could only love you for your good looks,” Barba said, raising his chin with no lack of satisfaction. “You’re smart, too.” 

Carmen knocked on the door and let herself in, bringing first a pleasant hello for Carisi and word for Barba concerning his schedule for the rest of the week. She’d kept it purposefully light, given her boss’s slow return to full form. Barba didn’t want to believe that Carisi would be the type to pass word along to his secretary to loosen the week’s hold on him, but her expression was just a bit too charmed, and Carisi’s much too buckled and hid. 

As Barba scrutinized his meager workload, Carisi tidied their spread and gathered their belongings. He did this quietly and with a private smile twisting at the corners of his mouth. 

They’d had two meals in three times as many days, and Carisi spared some thought as to which was better shared.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gave me so much trouble--in part, because I've written myself into a corner and have to show Barba and Carisi being _happy_ before I throw more heartache and ruin at their lives. 
> 
> But _mostly_ because season 18 remains total shit, and has given me literally nothing to work with. Y'all know what I'm talking about.

An old bolero peppered its upbeat tones and tinkling melodies throughout the apartment, rounding corners and settling into patches of dull sunlight, permeating the whole of the space. It was a Pepe Sánchez original, Barba said, one of his grandmother’s favorites. Carisi offered praise of the song even before it tugged out those first few chords.

Of course, Carisi’s fast pronouncements were borne out well, and the song lifted their quiet morning into a place of brightness unmatched by even the cloudless day outside.

In a moment of total relaxation and ease, Barba forgot that any upset occurred as recently as the previous week. He felt foolish for it, now. Jumpy. He chalked it up to unresolved issues concerning the sneak attack Mass and brunch operation Carisi implemented, nevermind its heartfelt roots. Barba decided he didn’t like being anyone’s _surprise,_ no matter how well-intentioned the introduction. 

And Carisi understood his part in that, largely because that morning hadn’t been kind to _him,_ either. And in subsequent days, the requisite apologies were made and accepted. 

Barba smiled, thinking after the past two weeks. Overblown scandal after overblown scandal, lines drawn and crossed, grand gestures made through fancy dinners and styrofoam cups alike, and the end result was a lazy Saturday devoted to the other’s quiet company. 

They said to one another in not so many words, _This? This is still good._

They might as well have shaken on it. 

Despite the litany of tools and toys Carisi had ferreted away into Barba’s kitchen--assorted pots, pans, whisks, even a sunny, smiling, yellow-colored egg timer--breakfast was a mild affair, consisting of coffee and coffee-flavored ice cream. Regardless of his denials, Barba was willing to milk his being sick for as long as it afforded him those few simple luxuries: unabashed sweatpant use and leeway with his diet.

After stirring from bed, they’d puttered around the space, entertaining the brief notion of making plans, going out. All that talk led them to one place, only: the couch, where they found easy comfort and effortless intimacy, and lost hours of morning as time stretched to meet the afternoon.

Occasionally they shifted, rummaging limbs and straightening their backs to better find the sunlight streaming in. But by in large, one position held: Barba and Carisi stationed at opposite ends of the couch, legs stretched along its length, feet either paraded over or tucked under one another. 

Barba, who felt the former arrangement was not merely his privilege but his _right,_ as the shorter of the pair, had his feet crossed neatly at the ankle atop Carisi’s belly. Carisi had one foot in his grip, and absently rubbed it from time to time as he read far along into an old paperback of Barba’s. His touch was warm and firm, and when the fantastical sense of dread in the story picked up, Carisi would squeeze.

And there was peace enough in that moment--and surreality in the exchange--that Barba could no longer focus on the files he’d brought home, or the relentless e-mail that dogged him--at home, at work, and the myriad of pieces of New York in between. 

When Carisi--now utterly taken with the tale--squeezed a little too hard, Barba didn’t feel pain, but something more akin to grief. 

Carisi wasn’t--at his core--a man poised to tip, tumble, and fall into unknown beds. His soft features and keen eyes weren’t meant for the consumption of others. He was openly dotting and kind, much so in the ways Barba surprised him by being--to an extent--in private. He was the bearer of all things earnest--from cannolis to make a good impression, to a wounded, open heart. 

And yet, how eager had Barba been to believe otherwise?

He glanced up--surreptitiously, he believed--only to find Carisi already looking at him, his expression soft.

Barba nudged him with his foot. 

“Disgusting,” he tutted. “Fawning over me like that. You’ll give a man a complex.” 

“So that makes how many for you, now?” Carusi countered, and mimed taking a headcount. 

Barba suspected he _would_ be the camp counselor type, corralling Barba’s neuroses like he meant to lead them on a nature hike. The thought so amused him that Barba did not bother making a smart comeback, leaving him to only look on over the other man, smiling as though he had a devastating line in mind. 

(Let Carisi manifest a few complexes of his own.)

A soft pinging noise from the far corner of the coffee table swayed Carisi’s eye. He opened the text only to frown, hum, and set the phone aside without answering.

“Work?” Barba asked. It wouldn’t be the first time Carisi was called to the station or a scene, and spent all of twenty seconds before heaving himself up, out of Barba’s company, all the while thinking up an excuse to send to his colleagues. One--ideally--they would not immediately see through. (Carisi was half-sure Rollins read every text delaying either his arrival or departure as, _[ Barba tho :( ],_ and he’d only used that excuse _once.)_

When Carisi took too long to offer a simple answer, Barba made another guess.

“Your side piece?”

Carisi did not echo his playful little smirk or haughty tone. 

“Not funny.”

Barba chewed away his grin, and tried to be perfectly mundane and respectable when he asked, “What’s up with those guys? Have you seen them again?”

Carisi slid his foot up and down the length of Barba, then wedged a toe into the man’s armpit. He dug in there, annoyed. 

“I’ve heard less clunky leading statements from, like, first year law students,” he said. “Which I _was,_ not so long ago, so let that sink in.” 

Barba glanced up from his phone, a pout eking through the flat expression on his face. Carisi had him there.

“Anyway,” Carisi shook his head. “No, I haven’t seen them. Or him. Just a couple of awkward texts. He apologized, I apologized. He says his friends all want to hang out again, that Gareth wants to show off his rat bar.” 

At Barba’s blank look, Carisi elaborated: “It’s still a Chuck E. Cheese.”

“That makes even less sense,” Barba said, and sank a little lower on the couch. He took Carisi’s invading foot by the ankle, and raised it to rest along the curved back of the couch. Carisi’s flexibility was quite known to him in that regard. 

“You liked them?” he asked, finally sounding as plain as he meant to. “Then see them.”

“After what happened? No way.”

“Dan--it’s Dan, right?” Barba was proud of himself, there. His put-upon ignorance _almost_ came through from overplayed to believable. “He’s young, gay, and from Staten Island. You’re bound to run into one another again.” 

Carisi made a face; he doubted that. There were over eight million people in the City, each affording themselves to fair odds that Carisi would not make a complete fool of himself again.

“I’ve slept with other lawyers, obviously,” Barba said--an offering, really, of similar circumstances. “Depending on how the sex was, those meetings can be pleasant.” 

“Yeah, that’s not gonna be a problem for me.” Carisi set his inquisitive gaze on Barba, understanding at once that a chatty approach was _not_ Barba’s first choice towards something that unnerved him or caused him pain. He’d sooner bury the very idea, and never speak of the thing again, but--

He knew Carisi could scarcely play that hand, let alone to a successful end. 

So he lent his voice--however unpracticed--to the effort of friendly deliberation, the kind to imbue normalcy to a vision for their relationship he had not yet perfected, but desired deeply. That they should-- _and want to_ \--speak freely, and fear nothing in giving of themselves to the other, but hazard only a misspoken word, was ideal. Language was pliable; when one word didn’t do, others could come to its aid. 

A dual sense of trust and a man’s own values were delicate things, and the threat of fraudulent handling was present even when these things--precious as jewels--were entrusted to a lover. If they could speak _to those things,_ to one another, all the better. 

Some garbled word to that effect pranced at the back of his mind, readying to drop to his tongue, but what came out instead was: “Hey, why is _my_ equivalent to _your_ sleeping with other _handsome, successful lawyers,_ just _gay guys from Staten Island?”_

Barba’s smile was small and full of mirth; any left turn from the heartfelt was welcome by him, especially when he wasn’t to blame for it.

“Do you _want_ to sleep with only other gay Staten Island _cops?_ I was doing you a kindness, expanding your circle.” 

“I’ll stick to yours, thanks. Handsome, successful lawyers.”

Barba decided he wouldn't mind that at all.

“Maybe one day you’ll join our ranks.” 

“Yeah, maybe,” was Carisi’s noncommittal reply. He tucked back into his book. He read deep into the world of Billy Pilgrim, trying to see the scenes and feel the written word like Barba must have done, decades ago. The book felt borrowed, both literally as its spine bent to afford its reading, and because the words themselves stole away in his head, ping-ponging against the confines of his memory, as Carisi stretched to recollect the tale. He'd read the book once in his youth, but scarcely remembered it.

Barba was aghast.

People compared Vonnegut to Briggs, the literary giant of Carisi's preference. Barba didn't see it; Briggs was every bombastic attitude Vonnegut stripped naked before a crowd. 

And Vonnegut had _heart._

Privately, Carisi thought that's what must have turned him off. In his youth, he was terrified to the point of life-threatening distress to even _encounter_ the inner-workings of his own--why tempt fate by discovering those of another man? 

“Hey,” Barba said, his head dipped slightly to catch the pinched anguish on Carisi's before the man remembered himself, and thought to dispose of it like coffee grinds and other necessary waste. So he was a second late in capturing his expression in a look of practiced peace, and Barba saw, finding the act outwardly unnerving, and privately--some rare feat. 

_This,_ from the man he accused of not knowing how to hide when it was in his best interests? 

How Carisi hadn't laughed openly at him at that juncture remained a mystery.

“I mean it. Make peace. There’s a big, gay world out there. You should want to have friends.”

A more genuine smile overtook Carisi's purposeful efforts. He liked that a showing of sympathy and concern ruffled Barba--he'd say something kind, then physically stiffen, as if expecting a harsh rebuttal. It was as though he didn't think he wore the sentiments well, and those he loved would prove his harshest critics. 

Carisi did not know how to draw Barba out of such thinking, except to allow his gestures to work, even if Carisi felt undeserving of the effort, or indeed--if the attitudes were misplaces. Barba refused to see the softness in his own eyes, or hear his voice turn to velvet and smooth over wounds like a warm balm. But he would acknowledge results. 

“I will, I will.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” Barba said, rolling his eyes. He knew a lie--placating or otherwise--when he heard one.

Shame crawled like a heavy hand up Carisi’s neck, then rested ominously rather than going for the chokehold. Under its weight, Carisi fought the impulse to fidget and excuse himself. He’d had an opportunity to make Barba happy and to put an unpleasant affair behind them both, but faltered. 

He did himself no favors, then, with further attempts to bury the matter: “Yeah, well. My best friends are three years away.”

His dismissive tone was no match for Barba’s inquisitive ear.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“No, what was that?”

Carisi looked around at the hole he’d dug for himself--and above him, Barba looking down from the crumbling edge--and sighed.

“Just something my mom used to say. ‘Cause I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up.”

“And she pegged your prospects at three _years?_ ”

Barba’s tone was bright and teasing, and for a split second, Carisi took up his metaphorical shovel and poised himself to go another foot. But if Barba had indeed forgotten Carisi’s tumultuous start at SVU--all the fumbling, his false starts, that mustache--then it was no small miracle, and Carisi would gladly rest in its shadow. 

“It was just a saying. I liked it. And--I _had_ friends. Some guys from school I ran around with. But I always liked bein’ with my sisters more.”

Barba did not want to veer into the topic of family--Carisi’s in particular. He stared at the man, searching now for something else to hone in on, and towards which to corral Carisi’s thoughts. If Carisi could not see the genuine good in resolving his encounter with Daniel, Barba could at least draw a sharp comparison in its favor.

“Hmm. Well, you could choose worse friends than someone who mistook your friendliness for something else…” For his own, Barba did not actually see this angle as helpful. By some measures, it was outright unfair.

But it would force Carisi to think, to reconcile what he was denying with what he’d once allowed.

“…Someone who would try to humiliate you in front of your colleagues, for instance.”

It wasn't kind--Barba knew that well before he put breath enough behind the words to carry them out into the world. But it was effective, and for his purposes, that made it right. 

All of Carisi stilled, except for his mouth which twisted in disapproval. Whether he took issue with the cold sentiment or the shrewd ploy, he answered for both. 

He said, “I don’t talk to Pete, either.”

And it was more than a statement of fact, but an admission of guilt. Barba felt stung by his own tactics, and supposed he should have guessed: Carisi still had a soft spot for bullies. He believed himself among their ranks, even if his only target was his own self. 

“That was just… what I had to do, you know, to save the situation.”

“I know.”

And the more Barba replayed the incident, the shrewder it became. Carisi was entirely able to do as Barba had advised--obfuscate, and if that failed, mount a chilly offensive--but only after its showing did Barba regret the order. Because Carisi still ended kindness into his every gesture, the thing was doubly tainted. The effort was made to spare Carisi's pride, but little did Barba expect he'd put his heart on the frontlines. 

While Barba considered tactical snafus, Carisi rearranged himself on the couch. He took Barba's feet into his lap, but stared out into the living room, perhaps taking in his own reflection in the blackened television set. 

“The whole--Dan--thing. It was just--embarrassing. I’m embarrassed.” 

“I would have thought you’d be used to that.”

“Dick,” Carisi grumbled, but was struggling not to smile at the well-worn insult. He fiddled more, now with Barba’s feet, tracing the arches and every jut of knuckled bone. Every caress was absently made; Carisi’s mind was elsewhere, stronger aligned with his memories than the flesh, bone, and pulsing body in his grasp.

“He kissed me and I ran-- _literally ran_ \--away. To tell you. And embarrass myself all over again.” 

No quick word of consolation parted Barba's lips. He was still smarting enough not to jump to implicate himself in the ordeal--naming his part in making Carisi feel worse by losing himself to the dreaded moment, and indulging in his darker fantasies. He had wanted to believe he’d been wronged because at least then, expecting it did not feel like such a profound waste of time.

So long as he believed Carisi might leave him, or worse--play him for the fool Barba had always said _Carisi_ was, and therefore exact the ultimate revenge--any imagined disappointment would be tempered, at least in theory. 

But he’d showed that hand, and more than that--Barba owed it to Carisi to give an honest read on the situation. 

“So tell him as much. He’ll be mortified on your behalf. It’ll be endearing.” Barba tried for an encouraging smile, but even he had to admit--swallowing one’s pride was easier said than done. A twinge of sympathy found him and Barba finished lamely, “Just… laugh about it.”

“Yeah,” Carisi agreed, then brightened. “Hey, maybe if you were there…” 

“Not this time, but next time.” Barba said, thinking that if Carisi truly hoped to maintain a normal friendship with these guys, he’d do well to pace himself. And to be perfectly frank, Barba didn’t want to be there for that discussion. 

Apropos of that, Carisi pointed out, “I’ve met, like, none of your friends. And the Lieu, Rollins, and Fin are mutual, so they don’t count.”

Barba drew his feet back, and sat plainly, as Carisi had done. A subconscious emulation of the other man’s unease or a betrayal of his own, Carisi clocked it either way.

“You met Yelina and Alex.”

“Raf.” As far as boldfaced lies went, Carisi didn’t think Barba made an effort with that one. “You could have introduced me to a subway rat, and it would have been less hostile.” 

Carisi wasn’t wrong, but Barba bristled all the same. He deflected, then, choosing to speak on the broader matter than to address his tense relationships with old friends and flames alike.

“It’s hardly my fault. You get a few hundred death threats and suddenly people don’t seek out your company. They think it comes with a personalized target for their backs.” 

Those relationships never repaired themselves--or rather, Barba never set himself upon the task. A few after-the-fact phone calls and some passing hellos only did so much to paper over the solitude Barba had faced while under threat--at least, until he’d drawn Carisi into the fold. 

“It’s really too bad,” he sniffed. “The assassination attempt story would _kill_ at dinner parties.” 

Carisi groaned outright, said, “Kinda like how that joke was _dead_ on arrival.”

Barba chuckled quietly after the bad pun born of his own sorry line. It was strange that their conversation was a thing of so many angles and shades that neither man had so sure a grasp on it so as to offer easy definition. They crested hilltops and sank into valleys of light and heavy topics, teasing and smarting throughout. At once the geography was alien, yet no step felt inherently untested.

In that instant, Barba knew he could have sparked discussion after a recent case, and Carisi would answer him in kind. Less a recalibration than a simple shift in perception. Any thought that it would--or should--be otherwise was Barba’s own doing. For too long, he’d believed Carisi to be chasing at his heels to have a common word or thought, but that wasn’t so.

Carisi was on his level all along; all that had alluded him was a willing audience. 

Admittedly, there were matters of his expression--rough enough to mask all the man’s potential behind his overwhelming keenness--but Barba was hardpressed to nitpick, now. There was a kind young man clamoring for his company, sharing his bed, _reading his favorite book._

Barba felt another line of defense find him--a truly _inspired_ bit of observation he had previously overlooked--and he struggled not to blurt it out. 

**_You’re_ ** _my friend._

As for how he’d make the case that friendship was viable from Barba’s end, but not Carisi’s, was simple. Carisi had said as much in the past, and although Barba had scoffed and leveled objections, more and more, the facts aligned themselves in Carisi’s favor.

Barba didn’t _have_ friends. He had acquaintances, some friendly and others not, and even among those he liked better than most, he did so finitely. He liked them all the way to dinner, to a show, to his bed. He liked them routinely, and well, and ultimately less and less.

He didn’t share a great deal of himself, only his mouth, his body, and that _other_ skillset he refined at Harvard. He disseminated his passions like seeds, but his thoughts remained his own, as did his heart.

But Carisi behaved as if Barba had no other setting than this, here, _now_ \--where he’d fashioned himself open and honest, where their best ideas came shared, and all the rest they touched on together. 

So naturally he was concerned when Barba didn't invite him to meet others who saw him in these lights, no matter how fading or changing with the times. Carisi waited dutifully, thinking, surely someone will come to mind.

“I know Fin’s rope guy,” Barba offered. It was true--they’d attended the same dinner party, once--and his confidence held, so Carisi let him off with a rueful shake of his head.

“I gotta meet this guy.”

Carisi phone pinged with the arrival of another text, and not a second later, jumped to life with an incessant ringing. 

“Is that Dan calling, now? Give him my best.” 

“Still not funny,” Carisi said, and heaved himself up, off the couch. “Hi, ma.” 

It was signal enough for Barba to take; he returned to his phone with studious attention. Even as he thumbed through e-mails and sent off responses, Carisi’s conversation held his ear--in no small part because he was the topic of conversation. 

“No, not this weekend,” Carisi said after a pause. His mother spoke again, at length. Barba imagined it was very much the usual: stunted inquiries after their son’s time and company, questions about work buttressing those awful, glaring intrusions-- _Well, Sonny, are you seeing anyone new?_

Barba had heard _that one_ before. 

Carisi had been cooking, his phone on speaker, when Barba--still wet from a shower, a towel wrapped about his middle--was drawn enough by the smells to investigate. Either wary of his mother’s static presence in the room, or mindful of the presentation he’d intended to make with the whole of the meal, Carisi had tried to shoo him away. Barba dodged his efforts; the other man had _made_ chocolate mousse, of all deliciously needless things. 

To suggest Barba paid for that refusal was a touch too rich; it was Carisi, rather, who ceded a piece of self-respect, who bit his tongue and swallowed back blood. It was Carisi who’d gone pale, then pink, then _brown,_ smearing chocolate on his phone--and subsequently on his cheek--in an attempt to silence both his phone and his mother. But where he had been devastated, Barba only rolled his eyes, stolen another taste of dessert, and left to get dressed.

“I’m at Rafael’s,” Carisi said, and took pains now to wade a good distance from where Barba kept, reclined and comfortable on the couch. Carisi took idle, swinging steps and relaxed a hand into his pocket, where it jutted like a rudder. He sailed around the apartment, letting the conversation swim idly around. 

“We’re hanging out, reading… I'm going to make dinner later, maybe.” 

The response he got--this one, unbeknownst to Barba--took Carisi into Barba’s bedroom. He left the door open a crack, but the attempt at privacy earned it back, and Barba made a point to jog his mind around other circles, to fill his head with every stray thought until there was no room for even an incidental awareness of Carisi’s conversation. 

Admittedly, it was not something at which Barba had much practice, much less intended to perfect. Ignorance was never a winning argument--it had its limitations and its pitfalls, all besides its inherently short shelf life. Barba wouldn’t stoop to accepting those terms for himself. 

Eventually, his unquiet mind found a path in the discarded book Carisi had been reading. Barba picked it up and fell into the world at once, succumbing to the written wonder of its fourth dimension. Barba felt strangely sated, reading over words he knew by heart, that Carisi was only learning now, and Barba here again, wondering at them from a tangential perspective. He was struck by the thought that sharing all things with Carisi would prove to be as strange. It was like finding old fruit with a fresh skin--his teeth broke through into something overly soft and familiar. There wasn’t a lot of give, and then there was _everything._

Barba strained to think of a kinder metaphor. 

He supposed _love_ was too hackneyed. Overused, even in just a year’s time. 

But nitpicking the terminology did little to change the subject. As Barba considered what else he could offer up, Carisi returned to the room, phone clenched one hand at his side, his expression resolute. 

He came bearing old fruit. 

“We should spend Christmas together.”

Barba didn't look up from the book. This was still more fantasy Carisi was spouting, so it didn't feel like too great a departure. 

“Because you want a repeat of last time? But with _more_ religious iconography.”

Barba raised his gaze to meet Carisi’s, finally, and found it painfully sincere. 

“My, you’re a glutton for punishment.”

In his mind, Barba was already thinking, _No._ He wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t his place--that much was decided for him--and if offered, he’d excuse himself from it, hurting Carisi in the process. Carisi was beating a dead horse with his attempts to integrate Barba into his family life, and it was Barba who was starting to feel like the horse. 

Barba was surprised, then, when Carisi echoed his thoughts.

“No, not with my family. You and me. Together. Doing whatever it is you do.” Carisi returned to his place on the couch, drew in his legs, and frowned. “What _do_ you do?”

“Whatever I want,” Barba said, thinking there had to be something intriguing there, especially for Carisi, who had made a year out of shucking all _kinds_ of norms. 

But Barba quickly realized he'd miscalculated; rather than excited, a look of dismay crossed Carisi's face, dragging his brows closer to his eyes and setting his mouth still as a grave. Barba had to chide himself: what was he thinking, trying to talk a Catholic out of tradition? 

The realities did not gel; Carisi was so stalwart a presence, but their relationship flitted between states of being and not, whole-hearted, half-recognized, or tailored to fit. So as quickly as Barba took to the idea--there were his plans, made--it slipped away from him. Carisi’s question was loaded with a desire for detail, to take more than Barba had to give. Barba couldn’t grasp the particulars, so he flung a question far and away from the scene of his own incompetence. 

“Carisi,” Barba started to say, but his attention fell on the man’s ankle, with the long, pale foot resting on his couch. Barba saw cause to hold the limb in his hand and smooth a thumb over the soft skin before he proceeded with another word. 

“You’ve never… not spent Christmas with your family, have you?” 

He imagined Carisi had brought all manner of girlfriends, and altogether had a good enough time. Barba supposed even if the girls were picked apart afterwards, they were first and foremost welcomed into the festivities, and given Carisi’s silence on the matter--never had he once suggested to Barba that every date he had got their metaphorical balls buster by his family--Barba knew he was surely near enough the right, if not dead center. 

Still, he didn’t entertain the thought long enough to let it bother him. 

_Much._

Carisi’s confidence waned. 

“I mean, there were two years--back when I was a rookie--and I worked through the holiday…” carisi supposed by the second year he was less a rookie and more of a pushover, but with all the jumping around precincts he’d done, he was something of a professional rookie. 

Needless to say, between the holiday shifts, he spent every available moment with his family, either at church or at home in Staten Island, or enroute to one or the other. 

At the doubtful look on Barba’s face, Carisi rallied. In Barba, he saw a whole host of things he’d never done for himself, never allowed for or of himself. He saw his own tenacity reflected back, because surely, it had taken him places. Barba’s apartment and a federal holiday should be the least of it.

“This is how I convince them,” he said. 

Barba’s hand stilled on Carisi’s leg, a wealth of warmth and weight. 

“Of what, precisely?”

And whether Barba knew it or not, the hand was reaffirming. Carisi dropped his gaze to see it, and smile, and lift that look of peaceable quiet to Barba, where it settled over the man, telling him everything well before Carisi deigned to speak. 

“That they can’t discard you. That you matter to me. We’re a package deal.”

Barba--though heartened--narrowed his eyes. The sentiment was sweet, but he’d come to expect as much from Carisi. The man was every good intention, all drawn and blurred into one. It go the better of him, at times, as any open heart would leave a man vulnerable. Barba did enough damage on his own, throwing around inconsiderately sharp words, letting them slide between ribs and lodge there, a bobbing pain that made Carisi wince even days after the fact.

But that’s all Barba had--knives to gut and prick. He had nothing like the nuclear arsenal of a family gathering. 

His natural follow-up played on the doubt that fermented in the ranks of the Carisi clan, if not in their heir apparent himself. 

“So now I’m the man holding their son hostage.”

“No,” Carisi said, and took care not to leap on the offensive. There was no cause for theatrics, because there was nothing to sell; he knew he was in the right. “You’re the man I love.”

To his own utmost disappointment, Barba remained wary. It struck him like a physical blow when he properly identified the aching feeling in his throat. 

“This won’t endear me to them,” he said. 

“We’re past that,” Carisi hired back, sounding certain enough for the both of them. “That was phase one--vacation pictures and funny stories.”

Barba had to smile at that--Carisi's efforts in that respect were all his own. He might have been sorry to miss the telling of those tales, were it not for the company they shared through work. The week following their return, Barba dealt with the mettle whiplash of speaking to things he'd not explicitly shared. It took some effort to find his footing, there, but for the sake of his pride--specifically, his refusal to be dubbed the _Angry American_ in the stories Carisi shared--Barba learned how to better blend their realities, and have his say. 

“And phase two…?”

“Indoctrination,” Carisi said, then elaborated, “Mass.”

“Ah.” Barba wasn't so surprised with his terminology; any gay Catholic would eventually develop a sharper sense of self-awareness. “And now we’re playing dirty.” 

“Hard to get,” Carisi corrected. 

“Well, we both have some experience there.” 

Barba turned back to his phone, but the litany of emails and news held little interest for him. When he raised his head again, Carisi's attention was already his to command.

“Why not just spend some time with them--you know you want to--and then we’ll do something.”

“A compromise? Outta you?”

“I'm entirely lenient,” Barba countered, and found evidence not an inch away. “Your feet are on my couch.”

“So are yours.”

Carisi said so as if he had a real point, there.

“Sonny,” Barba sighed, but let the next line of his argument go. He was left with a handful of severed strings, their corresponding lofty ideals sailing away. Barba saw only what was right there before him, what was _his,_ if he asked. 

“Really?”

Carisi nodded his head; he wouldn’t repeat himself. If Barba needed to again hear his plans--or lack thereof--he’d have to issue the terms himself, and give new life to Carisi’s words in the process. 

“Well, at least tell me what you’re missing out on. What do you usually do?”

Even as Barba posed the question, he was certain he already knew. Certain, at least, that Carisi had told him of all his family’s holiday traditions, and just a start down that line of thought would have Barba jogging along beside him, chiming in with half-remembered words and familiar phrases.

Admittedly, _Church_ and _food_ were easy targets. There was a special menu, of course, that struck Barba in a moment of deja vu, and he got to the dessert before Carisi did.

Carisi smiled at that, and took it as a hint to continue, to fill any gaps in Barba’s imagination with a wealth of detail--enough to overwhelm the man with entire scenes, scents, and sounds of a genuine Carisi family holiday. This much, Carisi believed, would be enticing. 

But if Barba smiled and nodded along, it was in response to the joy in Carisi’s telling, rather than the prospect of seeing any of his family traditions firsthand. 

The approaching Christmas holiday had long felt overbearing by Barba’s measure, and for that reason he'd held back, offering intrigue and mystery when Carisi had asked him plainly.

_What **do** you do?_

His earlier Christmases were spent with his mother and grandmother, with whom he’d entertain midnight Mass excursions, because the subsequent meal proved too great to pass up. Suddenly their world would expand, and it would seem all of New York was inhabited by devout Catholics of every stripe. His abuelita would dress up and be tickled at the prospect of having such a handsome young man take her by the arm--her grandson, but nevermind that. 

She’d fall quiet after leaving church, as if the beautiful words hung too heavily over her, and to raise her voice over them was no small sin. Barba could scarcely fathom the reaction; she heard those words every Christmas.

Nonetheless, he didn’t let her silence overly concern him. She’d be smiling again when they returned home, boasting proudly of all she’d prepared, how eager she was for Barba to sample the fare, how he would enjoy the leftovers well into the new year-- _no arguments! I’ve made plenty!_

They would laugh and eat well into morning, then exchange gifts, and part ways. Barba would call later in the afternoon and tell his grandmother where he’d stashed another gift for her--just a bottle of something nice, for when her girlfriends came over to play dominos, as Barba had known them to do since he was young. They’d curse and cackle worse than men on street corners, and he’d loved it. 

Since her passing, those few traditions had fallen away with her. All the motions felt empty without her bubbly laugh, too-loud whispering between hymns, and her simple delight at having both her daughter and her grandson in her life. 

Barba supposed he and Lucia knew they could not muster as much love for the holiday and their ever-shrinking family as Catalina, and feared they’d appear to be faking it if they tried. 

How would it feel, each wondered, to force love into a void? 

They went their separate ways.

One Christmas, Barba went skiing with friends in Aspen. The next, he rented a cabin upstate, and stayed there alone for all of a night, until the lack of reliable wi-fi got on his last nerve. Driving through dawn in wooded upstate New York was--admittedly--a strange, silent delight. 

Now, the cold crept in and the City donned itself in twinkling lights and swells of silver, gold, and all the rest, which was crass in places and timeless in others. In turns, Barba supposed he enjoyed the wide spectrum of it all. 

Still, there was only so much he cared to know: what his mother intended to do, how long Carmen would be out of town, and if Benson felt lacking for company. Otherwise, he planned to treat himself to theatre tickets and a steak dinner.

While Barba searched for his traditions, Lucia had found hers. The plans she had to visit family in Miami were long-set and a welcome relief. It started as a kind of commentary on Barba--he certainly didn’t give her much incentive to stay, beyond orchestra seats--but she’d come to appreciate the trips, the sun, the warmth. If not for her work, Barba thought she’d be of a mind to move to that most southern point, just a stone’s throw from their island. It would be a kind of coming home for her, or as close as her citizenship would allow.

Barba felt none of the same constrictions--instead, his problem was a wealth of possibility, as he considered adding Carisi to the spread. 

If not the theatre, would they kill time seeing one of those big-budget action films he so enjoyed, all of which seemed to be lit by a booklight? Would they tuck-in at home, or find themselves drawn towards their shared work family? 

Or would Barba follow awkwardly as Carisi tried to lead him, all confidence and pride, into plans and places already set, company decided, meals first crafted by great-great-great-relatives long passed? 

Barba considered this a square peg scenario; he simply would not fit. 

Carisi petered off, perhaps realizing he was describing to Barba a scene to which they would not bear witness. 

“And you want to pass up all of that for whatever last-minute plans I can muster?” 

“Uh, clearly _I_ would salvage our plans,” Carisi said, smirking. Already, the possibilities were endless: they could dine out or stay in, for meals and experiences both lavish and private. They could find a party or throw one of their own. If the weather held, they could go for a walk, enjoy the City all lit up and fine, a true spectacle, given the only other way Carisi felt he knew the place: just a scene, waiting to be discovered. 

Disappointed in his morose turn--but not so swift as to discount it--Carisi reasoned that even staying in, eating well, and sleeping late could be its own reward. 

He tried not to get too far gone into either scenario, offering up the arsenic pit to those sweet ideals: “Anyway. Who knows, I might have to work.”

“Oh, good. I live in hope that you might offset your family drama with a heinous crime.” Barba rolled his eyes and lifted his hand, waving it in lolling loops, as if inclined to let it catch on a breeze. “Just sweep all that you’re-the-man-I-love business off the table, why don’t you.”

“Why don’t _you…_ ” Carisi lost sight of whatever idle threat balanced on the tip of his tongue, and instead chose action. He leveraged himself up, off the couch and tucked in towards Barba, straddling him with grace born of practice, if not natural propensity. 

Barba smirked and let the younger man rest his weight in his lap, rising only to allow Barba’s hand access to his middle, then his hips, and beyond. Carisi practically bounced to lend himself to the cause of getting his sweatpants down around his thighs. Barba’s mouth twisted at the sight.

_The things this man did to him._

Barba’s hands ran up and down Carisi’s legs, reaching up under the thin material of truly hideous tartan boxer shorts to cup a handful of ass. 

Barba realized he must have looked eager, because Carisi boasted a grin that went well beyond _pleased._ He bit his lip just to get himself under control, which did nothing to stifle Barba’s preoccupation, which strained the fabric of his own sweats.

That smile, coupled with half-lidded eyes revealing only a shock of blue. Pink coloring his cheeks, a tongue eking out in want. He decided to be daring, and rolled his hips, and didn’t mind when Barba laughed at him. Barba was beautiful when he laughed; his mouth went sideways, loose enough to show a sliver of teeth, then pinched shut, sending all that incomparable brightness to his eyes.

And Carisi was luxuriating in being the sole subject of Barba’s interest. It played second fiddle only to the constant, drumming sense of impossibility--that this was him, and that was Barba, and that they should touch one another like they did--which fed his desire as surely as it had him nipping at Barba’s heels well before _they_ were even a possibility. 

_Impossible._

Those were the odds he’d beaten.

Carisi could get off of the exclusivity, alone.

“I love your body,” Carisi blurted out, when the moment had been generous with the sounds of mingled breathing, only.

Barba didn’t miss a beat. 

“That’s convenient,” he answered lightly, focusing instead of keeping the rhythm between their grinding. He bit his lip, looked up, inquiring silently if they were only toying with the idea, or if Barba could see will their bodies to a mutual end.

Carisi’s breath hitched, and in the vacuum of space huffed a wanting little whine, all air and absence of word or cohesive thought. Barba had his answer. 

Barba gave his broad hands to the effort, wanting Carisi’s attention just where he had it: hands in Barba’s hair, lips on his own or sneaking along his jaw. He began with Carisi, touching the man, exciting him. Carisi was tense until Barba made him tender. 

The couch groaned under their activity, joining their disjointed chorus of moans and breathing. By the end there was sweat--it beaded at Barba’s temples, and it was as if he could hear the droplets emerging to the thunderous applause of his racing pulse. 

They got one another off, with Carisi bearing much of the evidence. He had to relieve himself of Barba’s company to change his t-shirt, and this much was by design; Barba was comfortable on the couch and did not want to unsettle himself. He was more satisfied, instead, to sit steeped in warm skin despite the cold apartment, tug at his sorrily wrinkled sweats, run a hand through his mussed hair, and pick up his phone and type with fingers that had dug hungrily into pale flesh. 

It was a welcome departure from their honey-sweet exchange in court. Barba appreciated the variety: Carisi would just as soon as bring him a cup of tea to soothe a raw throat as he would climb into Barba’s lap, and take all the liberties to which he felt entitled. 

And when Carisi reentered the room, stark naked except for socks and a t-shirt, holding a pair of boxers in each hand, it was clear he’d taken heaps more liberties. 

_Scores._

“Hey,” Barba said, glancing up, then glancing down. “And hello again. So soon?”

Carisi rolled his eyes, but shifted some, as if any sense of decorum was now only lagging behind his bare-ass antics, rather than having abandoned him entirely. 

“Ignore my dick, please.”

“That’s a tall order,” Barba smirked, but acknowledged the boxers. “You come bearing gifts.”

“Don’t think I didn’t see the look you gave mine,” Carisi said of the soiled tartan pair. “You pick.”

Barba weighed his options between a blue-and-white striped number that closer resembled a pillowcase, and shapeless heather grey. 

“Choices, choices. None of them good.” 

His gaze strayed, zeroing in on something deeply out of place. Without thinking, he bolted forward, a hand seeking out Carisi’s hip and making contact such that Carisi let free a hiss of discomfort.

“Jesus, what’s that?” Barba asked, thinking frantically, _Did I do this? When?_

Carisi craned his neck around to see the ugly mark brazing the soft back of his thigh and climbing darkly up the curve of his ass. 

“I slid on some ice chasing down a suspect,” he explained, his voice plaintive in an effort to inspire the same in Barba. He didn't like the look on Barba’s face; concern was too close a cousin to fear, and Carisi hated to be the bearer of either. Worse, he’d never known concern without some biting commentary to go along with it. In Barba’s mind, it was as though every fool thing Carisi did could be avoiding, if only he’d given the matter some _thought_ (Carisi believed this bordered on obsession), some _consideration_ (again--Carisi assumed Barba kept a whole stable of dead horses to beat). 

He drew back half a step, and tugged on his boxers as far as they would go, if not for Barba’s hand. 

He gave a smile and joked, “But it’s weird, right? Looks like rug burn. Or diaper rash.” 

“Because the fabric of your slacks is literally more abrasive than cement,” Barba chastised while drawing his thumb lightly over the aggravated, pinkened skin surrounding the injury. Carisi had some nice pieces, sure, but he was practical to a fault, and wouldn’t toss out a so-so pair of slacks so long as they zipped.

(If Carisi were wearing the offending pair just then, he was sure Barba would pluck at the caustic material in disdain.)

“Maybe I’ll buy you a suit,” Barba said. “For Christmas.”

The expression on Carisi’s face softened. This was the other side to Barba’s host of concerns--his _caring._ That he cared for his work and his reputation were obvious--both spoke for themselves. He had the capacity for it. But Carisi was always nonetheless surprised when Barba turned those terms on him, and went a step further than his usual baseline consideration he bore for their schedules and Carisi’s work. Another band of it emerged at the strangest times, and Barba always looked relieved for it, like he should ever doubt that he _could_ be kind. There were gestures and words of every stripe, but silence too, and strong arms, all wrapping around him at the precise moment Carisi realized he could not go another moments without them. 

The attention made him feel an absurd rosey pink, and colored his face much the same. 

“You’re gonna buy me a suit?”

“Would you rather kneepads? Because I’m problem-solving, here.”

Barba was bluffing; he’d already bought the suit. It was beautiful, darkest blue and just a shade towards green--daring, to be sure, and a calling card for Barba if ever there was one. It was a damn shame Carisi wasn’t wearing it now, finely tucked into sharp, long lines and an expert fit. 

The boxers, he knew, were a no-go. 

Boxer briefs to wear with it, Barba supposed, weren’t so absurd a stocking stuffer--or whatever the term Carisi used to justify his buying little things for his niece, the toys and onesies, cloth wraps and baby-sized sunglasses. So long as there were grounds for that kind of thing, he wouldn’t make himself an absolute fool for the lavishness--and thorough planning--of his gift. 

Barba’s contemplative expression soon smoothed into one of idle bemusement. At their age, scrapes fell into the realm of skinned knees and burnt tongues--they simply should not exist, but remain as accidents of a thoughtless youth. How did one manage to pay rent and file tax returns in a world where they might still fall on their asses? 

No, their hurts should only be these: bruised egos, broken hearts, and those few fatal blows that scurried alongside their chosen professions. For Carisi at least, it was like rats in the city--the threat of grievous injury came with the territory. For Barba, his interaction was long-peripheral, until it literally met the side of his head, and all promises of separation, protection, and impossibility were broken. 

Barba closed his eyes to the memory. He reclined, putting himself in a position of comfort in the hopes that eventually he’d feel at ease. 

From Carisi’s vantage point, Barba was already that. He didn’t see an outstanding need to service any conversation, and when the impulse left him, he was quiet. Carisi recalled months of questioning those abrupt, silent spells. Like drawing blanks, he’d thought, until he, too, lost that nervous desire to perform. With Barba, Carisi would find a place of unremitting calm--sometimes cold and unpleasant, more often not, but always, _always_ there. An equal partner to the warmth he could display, the desires he held. Sometimes he spent them all, and wanted for little. But there was always that blank space, roomy and open for companionship. 

The realization that Barba found it first was thrilling. 

Carisi followed him there and knew he was welcome. 

He watched Barba--an open effort. Hazy light tangled in his hair, warmed his skin, and sweetened his features. The record player hummed, but its songs were finished. Barba smiled a spiteful little thing; he’d have to displace himself if he wanted more. He blinked tiredly--catching Carisi’s eye for the narrowest of seconds--and raised himself up. His bare feet were soundless on the plush rug, but he hummed to himself as he loitered at his record collection, weighing his options before defaulting to one of Carisi’s favorites.

It was a quietly bright and brilliant moment. Carisi could envision years of them--a _lifetime_ \--and felt his heart spill over with satisfaction. 

When Barba sauntered back--really, when did the man not?--he collected his still-warm coffee mug and took an idle sip, surveying Carisi all the while.

“So this is what you’re up to, when you’re not backseat-lawyering me? Running around the city, getting hurt?” 

“I prefer the term crime-fighting.” 

“I bet you do,” Barba hummed. “Did you at least catch the guy?”

“Did I catch him? Did-I-catch-him- _question mark?_ Raf, I'm insulted.” 

Barba only settled in; Carisi still hadn't issued a true denial. 

Carisi rolled his eyes indignantly and shelved his hands on his narrow hips.

“I… basically chased him in a circle, and Fin cut him off back at the car.” Carisi wrinkled his nose. “He doesn’t like to run. Somehow that always works out for him.” 

Barba huffed an appreciative laugh, then sat and cocked his head so as to again study the scrape. 

“When did it happen?”

“Like, Thursday?”

Two days ago, Barba thought. Yet, last night--

Barba’s particularly ravenous turn would not part from either man’s memory for some time. Carisi felt his face warm at the very notion that they were both--now--reliving some part of the previous night’s escapades, which culminated in Barba on his knees--this, though he spent a good ten minutes complaining about it, after--and taking Carisi’s cock down his throat. His hands, never idle, had spread open to carry the rest of his partner: ass and thigh besides. He’d propelled Carisi forward--hard--and taken him gladly. 

Considering the logistics, Barba arrived at his conclusion with a frown. 

“Didn’t that hurt?”

Carisi’s eyes went wide a moment too long as he summoned up a response. “No. Or-- _well._ I kind of… liked it.”

Barba gave a sideways smile at his fumbling, but the sentiment did much more for him than that. Warmth seated him flat, then reached out with spidering fingers to meet every part of him--it spread to the shoulders he rolled back, to the chin he inclined haughtily, even to the eyebrows that quirked up as the corners of his mouth took a comical turn downwards, like Carisi had given him something to consider.

“Well if that isn’t just the Christmas miracle to beat them all,” Barba said, and was privately utterly pleased when Carisi dropped like a sack of potatoes on the couch, and grabbed a throw pillow to bury his ever-reddening face in. 

Barba continued, “I’m not as young as I used to be, so I can’t consider the implications of that right now. But trust me, I’m filing it away.” 

Carisi groaned, but even purported annoyance could not mask the pink spread over his cheeks and reaching out to grip the tops of his ears. He relinquished the pillow to Barba’s invading hand.

“Whatever.” 

“I hope you’ll mention it, next time. Rather than, say, keeping mum on a dislocated shoulder while I carry on from behind.”

Carisi went a brighter shade of red, but acquiesced, “Yeah. ‘Course. I’ll raise a little flag and everything.”

“And I’ll gladly salute,” Barba teased. He spared some thought to how Carisi performed in bed--nothing so calculated, but a show all the same. He was eager to please and giving _to a fault._ And if his mouth wasn’t otherwise occupied or warped in an effort to make sense of his soundless euphoria, he was smiling. It was some intensely goofy, blissed-out look that Barba once found cause to question.

(“I’m sorry, I know you’re-- _busy_ \-- _inside me_ \--right now, but is something _funny?”_ ) 

Barba had to accept Carisi was simply pleased to be included, and he came to find the omnipresent, lopsided smiling endearing. 

“Sit up for me.”

The request--or _order,_ Barba thought, because who knows? Carisi might be into that, too--arrived unexpectedly at his lips. Carisi made a face but complied, drawing up to his height from the knees upward. Once level with his middle, Barba thumbed down Carisi’s boxer briefs, and kissed the pinkish skin.

Carisi’s expression in return was a vision, though it was nothing so lovely--or even aesthetically pleasant, given the wrenching efforts he took not to smile so overtly--but entirely thrilled. The moment wherein Carisi tried in vain to mask his delight soon passed, and Barba saw for himself the pleasing ease that overtook the other man. It began at his brow, smoothing over every line. His smile turned shy, and his eyes disappeared beneath a fan of lashes as Carisi looked down, somewhat, and gave a shake of his head. 

“You’re nuts,” he said. 

“Injured in the line of duty,” Barba said with a put-upon sigh, then wrapped his arms around Carisi’s legs and planted another kiss. This one held, and he smiled wolfishly up from the jut of Carisi’s hip. “Is it wrong that I enjoy that? I’m a taxpayer, this should come included.” 

“It’s downright patriotic,” Carisi reasoned. He liked the look on Barba there, liked the firm grip he held him in, the fingers that fanned from ass to thigh, and the forearms that braced his sides. “You like that, I got a papercut I could show ya…”

“Oh, please. Wow me.”

Carisi never got the chance.

His phone lit up where it lay on the coffee table, buzzing and ringing with some imagined urgency. 

“Let it go to voicemail,” Barba insisted, his hands now climbing north to reach Carisi’s middle, lifting the man’s shirt as he went. But Carisi twisted away, scrambling to view his phone with one hand and halt Barba’s progression with the other.

“No, Raf, it’s my dad--”

Barba’s hands were off Carisi as if the man was wearing naught but hot tin. 

“Hey, hi, dad,” Carisi answered while still trying to extricate himself from his comfortable place in Barba’s lap. He tugged up his briefs and sweats with his free hand, as if he believed such explicit disarray was leveled at a volume. “Ma say something to you?” 

Carisi fell quiet. The knotted feature between his eyes suggested he was listening intently to his father’s slow, steady speech. Barba watched Carisi smooth a hand through his hair--again, as if he believed every part of him was on display for this call, and not just his voice.

Was it habit or nerves? 

Barba thought about his own abusive father, and how he still kept much of that history buried, even from Carisi. Ashamed of how long it went on, Barba didn’t want Carisi to think less of his mother for staying with the man as long as she did. 

The thought manifested itself like a rotten bite of fruit in Barba’s mouth. It coated his tongue in something slick, and weighed heavy in his cheek as he refused to swallow it. 

No--Barba didn’t think Carisi would question his mother’s choices, even if they manifested themselves to Barba’s detriment. He was too good for that. What actually worried Barba was, Carisi would realize that Barba _did_ still blame her.

A sharp word not of his own devising filled the room, and Barba snapped to attention. Carisi was in the kitchen, having paced there, and from his curled lips came the kind of argument Barba figured had only previously gone on in the young man’s head.

“Because it was disappointing. I was disappointed,” Carisi said, and even from across the room, Barba was cheered to hear a little contempt creep into the man’s voice. He was too quick with even his unspoken praise, because Carisi both won and relented his position in the same breath: “And, I dunno, maybe you and ma could give me an earful on that front, too, but at least I tried.” 

Then he was quiet for a time, his face shifting and settling as he took in his father’s response. Whatever the sentiments, Carisi was exhausted by their end. 

“It didn’t make me happy and it didn’t come natural, and what I’m doing now checks both those boxes, okay?” 

Carisi flushed red at that point, and Barba figured as much was due to his unabashed eavesdropping. 

But Barba couldn’t turn away. He was fascinated by the exchange, even for only hearing half of it. Carisi believed there was getting through to his father, guiding his heart to Carisi’s own truth, a thing only recently cracked open wide. 

How did one do this? 

How did one _think_ to even _try?_

Barba found it to be entirely incomprehensible. He’d heard enough of his own father shouting in his ear--as deafening in his memories as it had been in his youth--and the man was long dead, buried deep, with not so much as a warm thought from his only son to find its wandering spirit well. 

Barba wondered why any boy would invite a grown man’s voice into his head past childhood, once he was no longer powerless to refuse? He had to remind himself that Carisi simply did not think that way. He wanted to be all there was inside of him, and then be seen for it. He wanted to share of himself with others--only the good--and bear from them the bad. This was how he knew to love, Barba reasoned. Why else should he be drawn to Barba amidst one of the darkest turns in the man’s life? 

It was a grave misuse of funds: Carisi’s whole heart for the most awful piece of someone else’s. 

At least Barba hoped he’d made up for their tumultuous start, giving to Carisi what the man had never allowed himself to want. But for every shred of affirmation, every tussle in bed, every part of one’s lips to speak honestly or delight in, Barba had no doubt about it--Carisi had him beat. 

Regrettably, the same disparity existed between the young man and his family. 

That Carisi should make these expenditures--these costly forays into _being_ \--and get so little in return was a shame Barba witnessed with some regularity. And Carisi did not have years yet put into this, he didn’t have the kind of portfolio of himself that Barba did. Barba could not pay his way, not when Carisi refused to accept his terms. 

_Keep it,_ was all Barba wanted him to understand. _Keep everything they’d just as soon as casually refuse. It’s better that it’s yours._

Carisi could not concile those methods with the gaping heart he wore on his sleeve, and so they arrived as they were: Carisi, making a valiant case for himself, and Barba, pretending not to notice. Carisi didn’t know better not to like it, so Barba didn’t like it for him. 

“He wants to talk to you.”

Barba mouthed _No_ so vehemently, neither man could be sure whether or not he'd actually said it. Carisi pressed the phone into his hand anyway, and Barba--with a withering look for Carisi--accepted it. 

“Dominick, hello.” Barba held one hand open, as if pleading with Carisi to feed him lines.

_I said hello, now what?_

“Very well, thank you. And yourself?” Barba’s bright eyes sparked with a curiosity he laid squarely on Carisi. “Well, the indictment is pending approval, but we're confident it'll go through to court next week.” He was quiet, listening. “Ah, no. Because of our… relationship status,” (Barba made a face at the term) “Sonny and I no longer work together in that capacity.” 

Again, Barba set his sights on Carisi, who was growing more and more nervous as the phone call carried on two, three times as long as he’d expected. 

“It’s my loss, really,” Barba said smartly, but to Carisi’s ear it was near enough to _flirtatious_ to set his face ablaze. 

Barba ended the call with an entirely acceptable, “Thank you. You as well.” 

He summed up his bemusement thusly: “He didn’t berate me _or_ threaten violence? What kind of father figure is that?” 

“What did he say?” Carisi asked, taking back his phone as if he’d thought to set the thing to record.

 _(Next time,_ he decided.)

“Whatever talking points you gave him, I presume.” 

Barba wanted to hold tight to a cool, dismissive line--he _really did._ But Carisi wore a look of sheer desperation, and really, what choice did Barba have against wide, blue eyes and chewed-pink lips?

“He asked about a case you must have mentioned, asked if you and I were working on it together, then said to have a pleasant weekend. It didn’t _sound like_ it would be my last, but gauging inflection through a phone call is always shoddy--” 

“Very funny,” Carisi cut in. “Did it sound genuine?”

“I think… it was a genuine attempt to sound genuine.” Truthfully, Barba didn’t know. Pleasant and genuine were different species, and from a man who’d stared at him curiously but managed to be civil in their first-- _last,_ Barba often thought--meeting, he couldn’t say definitively if Dom Carisi Sr. was either of those things. 

“I don’t understand your father. At all.” Barba admitted this much in a rush. Much slower, he asked of Carisi, “What is it with you two?”

Carisi tucked in beside Barba on the couch, this time not even playing at decorum. He wrapped one of Barba’s arms around his shoulders and interlaced their fingers. He _played,_ and Barba wondered if this was not his answer. 

“Used to be, he was kinda hard on me, ‘cause I didn’t stick up for myself when I got picked on, didn’t ever fight back. He didn’t understand that.” 

Carisi looked downcast; he didn’t, either. Innate sensitivity answered for a lot of who he was, but the silence in his youth had been palpable fear. Much of it external--from the likes of his bullies--but most, the worst of it, was everything Carisi harbored in his own heart. It was an awful presence he mistook as deserved. 

Penance, for those litany of sins to which he’d scarcely lent his thoughts.

“I became a cop and I think he thought all that pressure had all paid off, you know? Difference made.” Carisi mimed dusting his hands and excusing himself from the mess that was his own adolescent self. 

Barba nodded absently. He could almost see it: a father admonishing his son out of misplaced concern rather than outright cruelty. But it was a distinction without a difference, Barba concluded. A father’s intent did not retroactively alter how he’d made his son feel. 

“Our relationship is better now, no doubt. But back then,” Carisi shrugged. “I dunno. I know he loved me. He just kind of seemed… underwhelmed.” 

Carisi shook his head, dismissing the tangent. What little he knew about Barba’s upbringing was enough to want to herd his sheepish complaints back into hiding. But one quick glance at Barba told him differently: the man was listening intently, curiously. Instead of an unimpressed glaze in his eyes, they held firm and bright. A little frown hugging the corners of his mouth as he struggled to both hear Carisi’s admission and accept how the man felt largely unperturbed by it, now.

“And it’s probably why he doesn’t have much to say about,” he inclined his head some, and Barba took his meaning: not just Barba himself, but who Carisi was with him, and every choice therein. 

“I think he always suspected. _Something_ was wrong with me. Never said a word about it or--or name-called.” 

Carisi blinked, Barba didn’t.

Name-calling had always been the least of it, for Barba.

“But--there was something he saw in me back then that maybe disappointed him.” 

“How often do you talk to them?”

“My parents? Like, all the time.” 

“...why?” Barba asked, because genuinely, the arrangement boggled the mind. “More to the point, how does your ultimatum work when you inevitably FaceTime them on Christmas day?”

“I wasn’t going to,” Carisi huffed. “They’re family. And we don’t always talk about me, so it’s not some constant battle, okay? My mom’s actually really funny when she pretends she doesn’t talk shit about the ladies in her book club. And my dad… he’s got all these wild stories from growing up in Italy. And the way he tells ‘em--it’s really something else. You’ve never seen a room of Staten Island Italians go quiet, but they do, when my dad starts up. You’d love it.” 

“I’m sure I would.”

Carisi looked hurt by his own oversight.

“You _will,”_ he corrected. 

Barba kissed him; he didn’t want to argue.

Carisi kissed back, and reclined the instant Barba did, so that their departure was simultaneous. Carisi was still smiling as he returned to his book, although he didn’t read a letter more--couldn’t, not when he felt Barba’s gaze on him. It traced the pulse in his neck, the stubble along his jaw.

It was a thrill to pretend he didn’t notice, a small fantasy of his where he had an ounce of cool to spare when it came to Rafael Barba. Carisi knew he was fated to a life of restless glee. It would undermine even the calmest of mornings--a small price to pay when those feelings rose to the surface in bed, and were greeted well by an utmost pleased partner.

Even if he had that moment hours later--or less, depending on their moods--there was no denying the feeling that hounded him _right now._ He couldn’t sit still. 

He scrambled up from the couch and began to clear away the coffee table of spoons, mugs, and an empty ice cream pint.

“Hey,” Barba whined. 

“You don’t need more coffee. You’re not even answering those e-mails.”

“Not when you’ve gone and seized my means of production.” 

It was to no avail; Carisi made his brazen escape with Barba’s half-empty coffee--his third of the morning? Carisi had surely lost count. He watched the whole of it trickle down the kitchen sink, and wasn’t sorry. 

“You should talk to your therapist about your dependency issues. This counts as substance abuse, no doubt.”

“I’ve decided to stop seeing Dr. Bloom.”

Truthfully, Barba anticipated some reaction, but dishes clattering into the sink and Carisi looking gobsmacked far exceeded any of his expectations. 

“What? Since when?”

Barba shrugged. “Since a month ago?”

This, only because he’d canceled his last two standing appointments, though at the time he’d had every intention of picking things back up again after the holidays. Except--now he wondered if it wasn’t a kind of crutch he’d relied on for far too long. 

Carisi abandoned the sink--faucet still running, hands dripping wet--to cross the living room and better accost Barba with questions. “Are you serious? Why? What happened?”

“I’m getting regular sex, is what happened. An opportunity to self-aggrandize for an hour seemed redundant.” 

Even as the words left his mouth, Barba knew that _flippant_ was not the way to go.

“Raf,” Carisi said, somehow crafting an admonishment from a pet-name. 

“Why do you look like the chore wheel broke and you’re double booked?” Barba asked, his patience wearing thin. He’d expected--hoped--for a friendly word of congratulations, an acknowledgement that he must be _doing so much better, now._

Carisi couldn’t at least give him the backhanded compliment the perky receptionist had? 

“What all do you think is wrong with me?”

“Nothing,” Carisi denied, and continued down that road, stopping to pick up an inspect every argumentative pothole: “I just thought it was good for you, having an impartial ear. I know there’s a lot of stuff you don’t tell me, and don’t feel like you can tell the Lieu, because of me, so…” 

“It’s not as though I thoroughly burned this particular bridge,” Barba said, his tone flattening under the weight of Carisi’s persistent meddling. “I didn’t insult her office decor. I can go back, should I feel inclined.” 

And that should have been the end of it, except--

“I bet you will.”

Carisi said it simply, without hesitation--a mere point of fact. Barba clicked his tongue, not unlike a warning rattle from a snake. Meanness delivered in sharp, stinging bouts was still his first, best defense against comments he took displeasure in--even with Carisi. 

Perhaps, Barba was even _more_ inclined to let those poisonous barbs fling from his tongue. They’d already established they could love one another more; it stood to reason that _hurt_ was held in much the same degree. 

_“Maybe,”_ Barba allowed, his voice piping hot, “If for nothing else than to explore your vendetta against my self-esteem.” 

It was a silly line that neither man believed, but Barba said it firmly, and Carisi shrank back. 

“It was good for you. The sessions helped.”

“They did, when I was in need of help.” Barba narrowed his gaze, searched for what it was Carisi refused to say. “It’s been a year.”

“I know, but--”

“And I know it frightened you, too,” Barba said, the realization dawning like the entire sun. And though he felt a brush of sympathy, Barba knew he could not walk back his departure. Making a choice for himself was _always_ good for him. 

“But that fear isn’t cumulative. I’ve worked through mine, to borrow a phrase. Have you?”

 _“No.”_

The answer was immediate--aggressively so. Carisi looked down and away; Barba didn’t understand the true weight of fear when it was carried day in and day out. He didn’t _want_ Barba to understand, didn’t want to heave that misgiving atop all the others. So Carisi bore a sharp look and told himself it was better to look like a fool who didn’t know his own thoughts than to impart the worst of them on the man he loved.

“Well. I know a great therapist with an opening in her schedule.”

Carisi sighed but said nothing.

“We do a lot of talking,” Barba said, his tone pointed enough to reach Carisi right between the ribs. It was a criticism, but only just. “About us,” he clarified, because Carisi had looked at him wide-eyed and in want of the particulars.

He added, “It fell out of fashion for a while, there. Funny how it’s coming around again. Like those turn-ups on your jeans.”

And though he very much wanted to hold his tone, it had undoubtedly softened. 

“I hope you’re getting the answers you want.”

Carisi’s chest tightened; he couldn’t let _that_ go with only a sigh and a shrug. He spared half a second towards the idea of again extending his foot and making contact with Barba’s side, but dismissed it. That was teasing, and Carisi meant to get his point across. 

He leaned over the couch, sank into Barba’s space, and brought a hand to rest along the back of his sun-warmed neck. Any notion he had towards damning Barba’s sudden propensity for ominous pronouncements over genuine sentiment was quickly lost; Carisi stared at a man he’d shared a bed with, pressed his body into, and trusted more than good sense should allow. 

“It’s like you’re looking for something to be wrong,” Carisi said, and let his fingers spread through the short hairs at the base of Barba’s skull. “Are things going _that well_ that you gotta stretch for something, and even then, it’s that we talk too much?”

Barba drew in a breath like he was readying to go full-force into an argument, one in which he could list every doubt, find evidence enough to tie Carisi to them, and claim they’d arrived independent of his own miserable ruminating. 

He didn’t. 

He smiled wearily, accepting Carisi’s read on the situation as correct, or close enough to something Barba wished was so. 

No, he’d never had the luxury of inventing problems. 

Carisi let his hand slip away.

“That’s what I thought.” 

-

The following morning, Carisi made the self-described pilgrimage to Staten Island. 

Barba had watched with a weary, half-open eye as the younger man climbed out of bed. Thinking of the phone calls, he’d asked, “Damage control?”

Carisi insisted it wasn’t, and nor was he going back on his word regarding their holiday plans--or lack thereof. 

And like an eager fool, Barba believed him. 

Carisi even finagled Barba’s car out of the man, with one sly word towards what significance it might carry before an audience of his family. 

“Don’t bullshit me,” Barba had said, even as Carisi bent to kiss the corner of his mouth not lost to wealth of pillow. “You just don’t want to take the ferry in this weather.”

So Carisi had gone early that morning, off like a shot, and Barba dozed a while longer, those last lingering thoughts being of how familiar the set-up was, how constant a presence Carisi’s family had been amidst their relationship even well before Barba had met them. 

How easily they drew Carisi from the warmth of Barba’s embrace. 

How freely Carisi went barrelling into the cold to answer their call. 

Barba shifted in bed, and took the spot Carisi had abandoned. He laid there for a time, thoughtful, then decidedly not. 

What a terrible existence, he realized--to want a man so badly even that the thought of him wasn’t the feast it had once been. He needed that next, best fix: to talk.

He resigned himself to wakefulness. 

-

The cafe was a warm respite from the chill permeating the City. It was all anyone had to say to one another--the early, unusual cold, and whether or not it spelled a long winter. Benson had to roll her eyes at it all, but then, reasoned that these chilly days had been sweetened for her, that first snow, when Noah laughed and rolled and kicked up a mess of it in Central Park. He was so bundled up she could scarcely see his face, save for his toothy smile. 

Benson spied Barba immediately--he was the only one huddled around a spread of paper files and open notepad, rather than a sleek laptop. Despite his workmanship--which took no heed of the regular workweek, but spilled eagerly into his days off--he was dressed down, comfortably assembled in dark jeans, a soft grey sweater, and a forest green collared shirt peeking out at the throat. 

He looked tired, though Benson supposed much the same could be said of any of them. It only took two decades, but she’d learned the work invigorated her. It was the constant grind--the realization, day after day, that these crimes carried the weight of all that came before and all that would surely follow after--that exhausted her, exhausted them all.

When she caught his eye and he brightened, she realized she’d mistaken the trained look he held for his work as something more sinister.

His head bowed slightly over a table, contents strewn about its surface--

Tension warping his brow, and from it, _blood--_

It didn’t find her as often as it once did, but she reasoned now there was cause for a resurgence, because surely, wasn’t that their breaking point?

She still played the scene over in her mind--Barba, angry over their efforts as he emerged from a park, the strange blend of dismay and relief that no perpetrators had taken a chance. Her senses were overtaken with the grumbling annoyance of the units she’d called in, their time wasted. Benson recalled the exact moment that her own frustrations let Barba carry on out of sight, and even for clocking the strangeness in his disappearance only minutes out, she measured her failure in every second Barba spent under the muzzle of a gun. 

Was it then, that his trust in her was paid with his whole sense of security, or was it after--in her car, when he’d spoken to her at an angle so as to hide his tear-and-blood-stained face? When he’d surrendered his pride?

Benson cleared her mind of the memory. No matter how precisely she figured the timeline, it was still a shot in the dark, and the results were all the same: she and Barba had let their friendship waver. They’d watched their own selves part from the other, saw the passing as sorry, but dictated by circumstances well beyond their control.

So when the opportunity emerged to meet him for an impromptu lunch date, Benson made sure to find the time. 

Barba quickly did away with his work--bookmarking files, but closing and setting them aside all the same. Benson spied documents pertaining to four distinct cases. 

He gave Benson a weary smile that--very slowly--warmed into something more familiar. 

They began with the usual small talk-- _thanks for making the time, it’s been a busy couple of weeks, how about this weather?_ The chatter felt scripted, and the pair longed to move on from it. 

“We haven’t done this in a while,” Benson observed, smiling down at the spread of coffees and sandwiches between them. 

“No,” Barba agreed. He took a sip of coffee--hot, black, and infinitely better than what was brewed in and around the courthouse. “And that’s on me.”

Benson raised a speculative eyebrow. She hadn’t expected the admission outright. 

“I made the assumption that the fewer opportunities I have to talk about Sonny to you,” Barba paused, Benson’s status as Carisi’s Lieutenant going unsaid, “The better. But.” 

Barba realized he could scarcely summon the words, now that he was approaching something like a word of admonishment towards his own behavior. Indeed, he hadn’t thought the invitation through. 

_See Benson. Make nice. Retain one of my sole adult friendships._

“It feels sort of… absurd… not to. Now.” 

Barba frowned at his own seeming ambivalence. 

“Only now?” Benson asked, wondering if there was a development Carisi had managed to keep under wraps, or if Barba was merely slow on his own take. Their relationship was serious, and had been for some time.

Given Carisi’s propensity to share good news, Benson put her wager on the latter option. 

“It’s been absurd for a while,” Barba said, confirming her suspicions. She smiled broadly.

“That’s literally all I came here for. I could go, if you’d like--?”

“Oh, your wit,” Barba said, and allowed himself the gift of a fond smile. “And here I was thinking I’d missed it.”

It only took a few minutes of easy conversation drawn with expert humor and cunning for Barba to realize that, no, his existence had been sorely lacking for it.

Punchy music played softly over the establishment’s speakers, though it was an afterthought to the patrons, a predominantly younger crowd, the vast majority of whom were outfitted with headphones or earplugs, and were busy with their studies or work. There was little doubt in Benson’s mind that this was Carisi’s hangout before it was Barba’s. She found the notion more intriguing than expected, and wondered after both men’s tastes, how they split or bonded, and where Barba--somehow, she knew it would be Barba--drew the line? 

_Did Barba bowl?_ That was what she truly wanted to know, a simple revelation that ought to have been expressed to her in a series of bitter text messages. 

_[Send me a picture of today’s NYTimes]_ should have pinged into her inbox at ten on a Tuesday evening. _[I need to know there is still intelligent life out there.]_

Benson prodded gently towards that end. There was an explanation to be had as to why Barba bothered with this attempt to eschew the topic of his relationship, and in doing so, hold their friendship at arms length. If impropriety was Barba’s dealbreaker, she had a six-foot-tall example to show him. 

“I missed this.” Benson admitted this much with a friendly half-smile. She knew Barba held the same sentiment, but if he was too proud to say so--

“I missed you, too.”

There were meetings and chats that spanned the distance from the courthouse to Barba's favored coffee shop, jokes shared in between, drinks toasted in silence--but rarely this, rarely _them._

Barba knew Benson was owed better than that. 

“His career,” Barba made a face as he'd said it--shorthand for all he couldn't name, because it embarrassed him to admit he thought this way. If people saw him friendly with Lieutenant Benson, and _especially so_ with one of her detectives, what would they think? Would the questionable doing Barba assumed of himself extend to her? Would people see collusion and scandal where there was little but circumstance and dumb luck? 

“I didn’t want to hurt his chances,” Barba added. 

Much in the way Benson was forced to see herself through the eyes of others--in particular, the majority of men she worked for and alongside--Barba likewise had a view of himself from a sidelong eye. It was a tedious and oftentimes discouraging process, but such was how he’d learned to see himself in the world. He curbed his own behavior more often than he cared to admit, and yet firmly believed this much was done only in service of his continued existence. 

Carisi had dug himself a trench and was only now just toeing into enemy territory. Barba had to watch the man’s back for him.

Benson, Barba knew, understood without his saying so. 

“His image.” Again, Barba frowned. Perhaps the words weren’t jelling because his reasoning was bankrupt. “I know you would never let this color him unfavorably, _I know that,_ but.” 

_May as well come clean,_ Barba mused, and delved deep to reveal the shallow truth: “I suppose if something did happen, I wouldn’t want it to be my fault. Even coincidentally.”

Benson corrected the answer in her mind: He didn’t want to be _blamed._

“You’re your own harshest critic, Barba.”

“Don’t let anyone tell me different?”

“It’s… refreshing,” she said, and had to don her most satisfied smile. “Considering Carisi looks at you like God took his time and Jesus Christ consulted.” 

Barba smirked at that, and denied nothing. He may be trying for reserved in the workplace, but the man wasn’t blind to the way Carisi stared at him--now, or before. 

Benson raised her coffee mug, toasting the meeting of humanity’s starkest divide: the adoring and the neurotic. 

“It balances out rather nicely,” she concluded. Barba took it for no less than what it was--a subtle word of congratulation, affirmation, and joy. He practically glowed under it--a thing he’d never live down, if his cheeks had flushed warm and his bright eyes gone downcast before anyone other than her. 

She wondered sadly if he’d been holding this in for as long as they’d been distant. His shy, buckled-down giddiness wrapped in a sweater did not gel with the three-piece-suit wearing, immaculately composed vision of a cutthroat legal heavyweight he presented to the world. Neither was an act--both were among the multitudes held inside this one man--but only one of those parts of him really got to shine before an audience, and the other was tucked away, cupped and covered in both hands, and held close lest someone see it, mock it, their hot breath coming to lessen its shine. 

Murderers and psychopaths did not frighten him; what concerned him, rather, was the banal evil in the world, the means everyone had to cut others apart. He had a right to be scared--he wielded those powers himself, and couldn’t be said to be sparse with their use. Worse, that was his first line of defense. 

And Benson supposed that was the kicker: What if Barba met someone like himself out in the world, Carisi in tow? 

Finished with their coffees and meals, but by no meals their conversation and one another’s company, they ventured to Benson’s nearby apartment. There, Benson relieved Lucy, and thanked her for caring for Noah that afternoon, as well as putting him down for his nap. 

She then promptly put on a pot of coffee, fixing Barba another cup as they fell back into still more familiar patterns. Barba tutted after the clutter in her home, having to kick a path of toys to reach the couch. He set upright an upended toy box, and tossed things in, playing at idle entertainment, but tidying all the same.

Benson snaked around the apartment, sweeping up stray Cheerios and sippy cups as they laid like debris in a shelled cityscape. She did this with a content smile on her face, warm and well-deserved. It never escaped her that motherhood was never promised, and her child was a tremendous effort, even, on behalf of her friends and colleagues.

“What, I don’t get offered a graham cracker?” Barba asked when Benson plucked a box from behind a couch cushion, and joined it in her armful of misplaced kitchenware. Absconding with wooden spoons and measuring cups was Noah’s latest passion. 

“Knock yourself out.”

Benson tossed him the box his way. She was reminded of a distant conversation they’d once had, with Barba hearing out her concerns to Noah’s lineage. She recalled how he’d kept quiet on her behalf, despite the noise it caused with their case against Johnny D. 

He hadn’t been shy about giving advice, but hadn’t chastised her for not taking it, either. He’d been a friend before all else. She thought she’d afford him the same courtesy.

“I hear things have been a little tough to take lately.” 

Barba narrowed his eyes and swallowed a mouthful of dry graham cracker, then chased it with coffee. 

“How do you hear things when I’m not telling them to you?”

“It was on a stakeout. Rules don’t apply after eleven hours sat in the back of a freezing minivan.”

Barba wrinkled his nose. “Sounds like the tagline to an 80’s porn flick.” 

“What uppercrust porn were you watching in the 80’s that had a full sentence for a tagline?” Benson teased. “Rest assured, none of us ‘huddled for warmth.’”

Finally, she got a laugh out of the man. They were rare, and all the greater for it. Barba’s laugh was rolling and warm, like drunkenness personified. It teetered towards giddy. 

“So?”

On her small couch, they were nearly knee-to-knee. If Barba meant to shy away from her now, there would be no hiding his efforts.

Benson knew this, and Barba knew this. So Barba played it up.

He looked her square in the eye and gave a half-smile--weak, but polite, the kind she most saw from him apart from those shark-like grins of satisfaction that better defined his worldview: there were predators in the world, but people like Benson and himself--they were big game hunters. 

“I'm almost afraid to ask how much you know.”

Benson raised an eyebrow at that, which Barba took to mean _Not nearly as much as you’re insinuating._

“He’s great,” he said, again slipping into that strange, warm territory that colored him in pinks and golds. The former in his cheeks, the latter flickering wild in his green eyes. When he wore his happiness, Barba was a startlingly beautiful man. 

Then the walls crept up and rigidity staked a claim in his shoulders, and spread like a chill through the line of his jaw. 

“It’s the rest of his battalion that’s up in arms.” 

“Navigating families can feel like a warzone,” Benson offered. 

“Maybe I should see someone older,” Barba mused, and indulged uselessly into the fantasy of a man free of familial attachments. “Or an orphan.” 

“Well, not to toot my own horn…” Benson teased, and smiled broadly when Barba grimaced and realized his misstep.

“His younger sister is a doll,” Benson reasoned, waving off Barba’s obvious discomfort. 

“Bella’s fine.” It was an unparalleled compliment, in Barba’s own way. Now that Benson had drawn that much out of him, that was it. He was a lost cause, wholly succumbed to every trick at Benson’s disposal: her coffee, her couch, her kind, attentive eyes.

“The older sisters are psychopaths. I swear, the way they look at me. Like I’ve defiled something of theirs but it’s all very _recherché_ so they appreciate it _in theory._ ” Remembering the conversations he was audience to at brunch some weeks ago, Barba rolled his eyes and continued, “God, by the way--recherché. They must share a word-a-day calendar and not fully grasp the concept.” 

Barba took a breath. These weren’t thoughts he could share with Carisi for obvious reasons. He glanced at Benson, hopeful she’d have sense enough to stop him if he went too far, because surely, Barba didn’t have _a lick_ of sense about him. Dating a colleague, then breathing a word of complaint to that colleague’s superior--these were not the actions of a sensible man.

Barba wet his lips. Everything he wanted to get off his chest was there on the tip of his tongue. He sipped his coffee, but anything now was a mere delaying tactic. 

And though he should have expected nothing less from a trained professional, Benson seemed content to wait him out. Barba swallowed down his own promise, 

“His father is… watchful. Uncertain. _Trying,_ but--he doesn’t say much, regardless. His mother _hates me._ ” 

In that moment, with that pronouncement hanging in the air, Barba didn’t understand himself. He claimed not to care--and still, was sure he didn’t, not so much--but Carisi’s pleading eyes had somehow cowed him into place. He took the other man’s displeasure for his own, and wore it in his stead. It was ill-fitting; Barba didn’t have the heart for family affairs, never did. But he covered himself in the cause, buttoned the thing to his throat, and spoke through the discomfort.

“She thinks I’m this lecherous old man who has ensnared her darling son, filled his head with propaganda and filth, and--and debauchery. She thinks that I’m only using him to fulfil some fashionable pretense I have about being younger or daring or _white._ ”

“Barba…” Benson started, and though she was doubtful that Barba’s interpretation went uncolored by his own misgivings, she could not commit to either a dismissal or a sympathetic word. She knew better than to question what it was Barba felt--only question the shades with which he painted the cause.

Barba heard as much through her tone, and sighed. Relented. 

“It’s obvious they’re not miserable people. Carisi is very much one of them.” 

_He went along with their thinking--to a point._

Barba held his tongue, there, and decided against sharing with Benson that besides hapless dates with women, there’d been a last-ditch effort to set Carisi up with someone who met a more familiar string of criteria than he. _That_ would certainly draw pity, and Barba wanted not so much as a taste of it. 

He collected those thoughts and wished to dismiss them outright, but only got as far as a blurring their edges. 

“This whole response just feels very… pointed.”

“Sorry,” Benson said, and though it felt like a miniscule response, she knew Barba didn't want a geyser’s worth of sympathy. There was relief enough in just sharing his troubles, having them heard if not answered for. 

“It bothers him more than it bothers me,” Barba admitted, then brightened. “Which is to say, it bothers him at all. I’m entirely over it now.” 

“You almost had me there,” Benson said, and offered a commiserating smile. 

Barba smiled back, then shook his head. Privately, he admitted defeat. 

“It’s just a process,” he said, but even trying to walk back from his outburst, he dragged his heels. “One I’m not particularly enthralled with, or equipped to navigate.”

“You’ve never _met the parents_ before?” Benson asked, but realized her error the moment the words left her mouth. Surely he _had,_ and that wasn’t the problem. “You’ve never not been _adored_ before. Or not been seen as quite the catch.”

Barba served a withering look in response to her teasing tones. 

“You understand my predicament, then.” 

Olivia Benson was beautiful when she smiled, wild and wide, joyful and relentless. It came from a place of oft-tapped power, and broke the surface of her being with all the bravery it took to spare a little part of herself towards some amorphous moment. 

She did not smile in such a way _then,_ but rather bit into naked air with a luckless look of _who, me?_ She knew nothing of Barba’s predicament, but cast that much aside. 

And Barba found she was more beautiful when she let go of some deep sorrow. 

“Can I--” Benson started, then stopped and laughed at herself. “God, I see your point. Stop me if I overstep.”

“Of course,” Barba replied, but felt a line to his nerves catch fire, like it was a stick of dynamite and every teetering question was a flickering light. 

She drew her right leg up to tuck under the left, and Barba noticed how the grey wooly socks she’d worn inside her boots came up over the hems of her jeans. It was decidedly _cosy,_ and familiar in ways they hadn’t been with one another in some time, and perhaps in ways neither hazarded to expect. There were new attachments to recognize, new lines of association threading them together. Barba had long considered Benson his closest friend, but his involvement with Carisi strained some of those lines, severed others, and established one frighteningly new thought--

Was Benson now some bizarre shade of an in-law? That was the impression Carisi gave when speaking about his squad--they were family. And to suppose his self-inflicted removal from her company was a warped reaction to the very idea that he might be making family from friends was--regrettably--no beyond Barba’s capacity for self-serving tendencies. Friendships, he knew. He understood their purpose and power, the means by which they could be used to better a life, twist an arm, or break a spine. 

Families were far worse.

All the same, the socks were a look well beyond darling, and she had sentiments to match. 

“You’ve made him very happy,” she said, and preemptively rolled her eyes as Barba rolled his, cutting straight through the bitterness. “This job doesn’t allow for much of that, so it’s… really very special, when something comes along… When life opens up, and gives you that.”

She gave a miniscule shake of her head and wished she’d served stronger stuff than coffee. 

“Don’t go breaking any hearts, is all I’m saying.”

“What if he breaks mine?” And because he would allow himself no less--even among friends--Barba put upon a slick sheen of indifference to the idea. “Or would you just be pleased for the confirmation that I do, indeed, have a heart?”

Benson did not fall for his act for one second. She gave a conciliatory shake of her head and admitted wholeheartedly, “I’d be very sorry.”

It went without saying, then: _He’s made you very happy, too._

Barba busied himself with a sip of coffee, and absently turned his head towards the windows, from which he could hear an ambulance wail as it traveled eastward. Benson didn’t so much as blink at the interruption. Barba wondered which it was that failed to surprise her on a Sunday afternoon--the sound or the sentiment.

“I’m as surprised as anyone this shook out the way it did. Not blowing up in both your faces, and all.” She brought Barba back down to earth with a cheeky smile.

“Oh, well, we wanted to try for shock and awe, but as it happens that’s trademarked.” 

Despite his easy smile, Barba weighed the notion of telling her about their brush with exactly that. The misunderstandings and jilted language that had caused enough upset to put days between them, then exposed the gaping chasm that was Barba’s doubt, and flooded it with all of Carisi’s heartfelt certainty.

Barba held back, deciding instead to hold fast to the core objective that hounded his every interaction with those in a position of power over his partner: spare his pride. Though simplistic in retrospect, Barba only arrived at this notion with some genuine effort. He did not need to air grievances more than Carisi deserved a healthy relationship with his commanding officer.

But then, Barba never lacked for grievances. 

“Really?” he asked, unable to help himself. “You were surprised?”

“Pleasantly so,” Benson said, then narrowed her eyes. “Why? Oh, Barba, it’s a little late in the game to be casing the match.”

“No,” Barba said, and Benson found his unease in talking after his love life not unfamiliar, but sad all the same. This was a man in his forties asking after reception to a long-and-done deal. 

But then, Benson supposed most love made people feel unsure, and nowhere else was there such abundance of that feeling than in one’s introspective youth, and so the two were irreparably intertwined. 

“It just… feels very normal. I’d hoped it looked that way.” 

To Benson’s eye, Barba looked relieved for having said so. It was as though he feared a whole other set of words would come tumbling out of his mouth if he so much as opened it to Carisi’s name.

“Well, speaking for the masses, we hear more than we see,” Benson pointed out, then sipped her coffee and let Barba sweat the specifics of that statement. “Carisi always has something to say about your weekend, but you two manage to stay… low-key.” 

If he wasn’t so confounded, Barba could have laughed. That anyone _knew at all_ meant _low-key_ was a pipedream. It still unnerved him--the odd question, the unwitting glance that went to him, then to Carisi, and glazed. Barba felt nagging doubt spread through his stomach at every hanging word or knowing look. That feeling sank into flesh and left it discolored and tacky, and Barba moved a little less easily for it. 

_The masses,_ as Benson put it, knew what there was to know, and could extrapolate all the rest--people did that, instinctively, and there were no idle minds among a group of detectives. They knew the secrecy, inferred the sex, and saw only Carisi’s open adoration and Barba’s brassy showmanship, then placed the two together without all else that had come to fill the picture: fear, love, curiosity, and kindness. 

Before that sinking feeling could take root, spread like frostbite throughout his intestines and leave them tough and unuseable, Barba got out ahead of himself, and was reminded that Carisi was right, and Benson would surely say the same: he could count these people as friends. Whatever they knew or thought they knew, it came from a place of some goodwill. 

Of course, Benson meant nothing of the sort. 

Her point was that they observed professionalism like a religion, and were pious as nuns compared to others who had coupled--however briefly--within the precinct walls. Benson knew her own forays into such territory were not always well-met, and had her share of concerns about perception. 

But she’d gone into those relationships clear-headed and mindful of their shelf-life. In most cases, she didn’t see a future beyond breakfast. 

Benson believed she and Barba were very much alike in those respects. His pragmatic thinking had doubtlessly been thrown for a loop by Carisi’s insistence in sticking around. 

She was hopeful, then, that Barba would take the bait and welcome himself into a more open forum. She’d ever much like to see for herself his new normal with Carisi.

“Are you coming? This Friday?” 

“You want another round of this?” Barba asked warily, but to Benson it was a resounding _yes._ She didn’t doubt Carisi had secured Barba’s attendance, and her own efforts were perfunctory at best. 

Barba sat back, let a comment after how she invited him to her place to get a jump start tidying up roll around on his tongue. 

“I have to make an appearance at the DA’s equal-opportunity, non-denominational, festive drinking occasion, first.”

Benson smirked. “He get all that on the invitation?”

 _“Miniscule_ font.” 

“Is Carisi joining you?”

“There’s an idea,” Barba mused, and--like Benson--found himself wishing for a glass of scotch over a mug of coffee. The very notion first struck him as awful and ill-suited to the moment in time they occupied. Their lines of work were still too close for comfort, crossed and twisted up into one another in ways that tipped towards scandal and poor planning. All this, and yet he should draw Carisi further into his professional sphere? They’d crept out here and there, and seemed always to cross into the limelight. Seeking one out was foolish, and needless besides. 

But then, for all the faults he found, none spoke as clearly as the one voice Barba offered to the opposition.

Carisi would probably _want_ to go--or at the very least, be invited. 

And in the moment he considered Carisi’s desires, Barba knew he was sunk. 

Realizing he’d only taken the odd date over the years--or left with one more often than not--Barba found the prospect of making a single introduction and being set for years to come strangely comforting. 

_This is my partner, Detective Sonny Carisi,_ Barba thought to himself, testing the phrase. He wanted to match in tone what he would not say aloud. 

_You’ll be seeing more of him._

He decided on the spot that Carisi should join him. _Would_ join him. 

He glanced sidelong at Benson, and knew she’d never had any doubt as to whether or not he’d do right by Carisi and himself. Barba envied her that confidence, and when he next spoke, tried to remember how it tasted on his tongue.

Tangy, sweet. Satisfying.

“Yes,” he said, and resolutely met Benson’s sparkling gaze. “I suppose we’ll both be a little late to your place.”

-

Barba meant to tell Carisi the good news-- _I’ve decided you can attend this thing to which you likely already expected to go_ \--but life erected itself like a concrete wall between their company and idle conversation. Any time spent together the following week was shared by the rest of the squad, or a litany of roving officers of the law and the court alike. 

They caught a case--open and shut, but only insomuch as guilt was known, and not yet proven. 

Their victim knew her attacker, and Rollins pulled out all the stops to get a confession. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer--that much, Carisi listened for outside the interrogation room as Rollins toyed with the man for hours before coming away the victor. 

Carisi felt strange, afterwards. Like he'd glided through two days of work, in and out of hospital rooms, encouraging smile after encouraging smile. 

At a point, he couldn't do it anymore. 

He went to Barba, sought solace in his embrace. And Barba did draw him in, first by a mere touch of fingers, then press-curled palms, until finally they stood flush together, each leaning on the other, the effort combining to hold both weary bodies upright. Carisi breathed in the scent of Barba’s shampoo and cologne, both long stale, tempered by sweat and the mere length of a day.

Only the venue was wrong; Barba’s office, with scores of law books all dressed in green, red, and gold, the heavy leather couches, and absurd fireplace that took some tasteful decorating to quiet its presence and obscure it into the ash-green walls. It was Barba’s sanctuary, same as any Catholic church was for Carisi.

So Carisi chose to mind his manners. In just holding Barba, he met that sole need that ravished at him from within, chewed the lining of his stomach, and cannibalized his good sense.

The hour was late enough that Carisi thought they should be in Barba’s lavish bed, under its soft sheets, waiting for the easy light that carried from the foot of the bed to the headboard, each and every morning. He’d have preferred that, certainly.

Instead, he’d all but had to pencil himself in with Carmen, because there was scarcely a solitary moment in the day where Barba wasn’t fielding a meeting or a call with victims, witnesses, or the DA. And all that was well and far divorced from the _work_ Barba did, pouring over the details of a case, studying lies and figuring his way to the truth. 

Carisi knew this, and thought better of distracting Barba for too long. As a result, he had only called Carmen once, asking how Barba’s schedule looked. She replied with a slow string of texts, each postponing the previous time’s possibility. They met--at last--after Benson took pity on Carisi, and sent him with what was in all likelihood an empty file folder to Barba’s office.

Carisi’s fingers slid under the elastic hug of a blue-and-orange suspender strap, then dug into the fabric of Barba’s shirt. Barba felt soft against him, but soon stiffened, his whole self drawing to attention as he realized Carisi wasn’t passing by for a chaste embrace. That this, instead, was a matter of some necessity. 

Barba drew his arms around the other man, swift and hard enough to hear a dull _thump_ of the air going out of the space between Carisi’s shirt and his suit jacket. Barba fanned his hands out to get all of him in. 

“Hey…” Barba started softly, but Carisi interrupted him.

“I know you’re busy--” 

“It’s fine.”

“Can I just--?”

“Yeah.”

Barba readjusted his arms so as to capture Carisi in a still-tighter grip.

When they drew apart, Carisi took two steps and turned. A shuffle, really. Retreat. Embarrassment rolled off his shoulders and he raised a hand to smooth through the back of his hair, as if he could look any less a mess for intruding on Barba at his workplace for--of all things--a _hug._

Barba decided it wouldn’t be only that. He collected a bottle of scotch and two glasses from his lower desk drawer. He poured two helpings and went to the couch, and didn’t have to wait long for Carisi to join him there.

There was a terrible dullness in Carisi’s voice when the man finally deigned to speak. Barba hated to hear it; it felt far-away and muffled--a voice from a dream. Barba brought a hand to rest on his shoulder, just to convince himself Carisi was really there. 

“I'm wrong to feel this beaten down,” Carisi said.

“You're not,” Barba countered at once, though even he was unsure what he was responding to: if Carisi was wrong, or beaten down?

Carisi ignored him and continued on, teetering on mournful that he'd felt compelled to find Barba and confess this to him. Why not, he supposed, make a day of it, and laden them both with the burden itself? 

“Like I've taken it on in any way, just knowing the details. It didn't happen to me.”

“It's good that you empathize. It makes you a better detective.”

Carisi shook his head. Barba was making the reasonable argument, but Carisi likened it to a crisis of faith. There wasn't reason to be found, only a moral guidepost with which to redirect himself. 

_But why come to Raf for that, either?_ Carisi asked himself. A sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach reminded him he knew the answer; it was printed up in embossed fonts and hanging on the wall of his apartment. His mother asked about it daily. 

A law degree. An opportunity. Why let it go to waste?

In terms of where Carisi saw himself going--in life, in his career--Barba was far and away the ideal. 

_What do I do,_ Carisi wanted to ask, _When it’s like… I’m feeling too much and doing too little?_

But he was ashamed to posit the thought, largely because he’d never say as much of Benson, Rollins, or Fin. Altogether, they did incredible and important work. That nagging sense of doubt, that unresolved tension sitting like a rock in his gut--that’s all Carisi.

So he did what came naturally to him: he bulldozed well over the quiet sentiment with a litany of bombastic terms and questions and half-hearted admonishments. He set himself up to sound like a fool and found cover in the glazed-over look in his listeners’ eyes, content that he’d narrowly escaped a truth, that he’d lost them.

“Why should I get something from it, though? Why do I get to use some poor woman’s suffering like a free trial of Rosetta Stone? Like, how _Operation Paperclip_ is that?”

“Uh, not at all, but bully for you, knowing your history.” Barba raised a hand to rest up under Carisi’s drink, inching it ever-so-subtly towards the man’s mouth. 

Carisi drank, but it was Barba who felt the numbing effects. Then, his tone drained dry of the concern that had once flooded it, Barba asked, “That's it?”

Carisi shot him a look, but realized he didn't want to confess everything all at once. If his soul could be saved piecemeal, that'd be more than he deserved.

“That's not enough?”

“Feeling sorry for the work,” Barba surmised--again, perhaps harsher than he meant. “Surely that's nothing new.” 

Barba held his stare and soon won out. Carisi sighed, dropped his head. No matter the reason, he was sulking.

It was awful, was Carisi’s point. He supposed he could get Barba on his side, insisting it was also _tedious._

“Perry’s attorney is gonna try and get the confession thrown out.”

“Bass said that?” Barba asked, curious as to how Carisi was privy to that fact. Barba knew the attorney by reputation only, and thought him fair-minded. What Barba didn’t think was that Carisi should be assumed as a go-between. 

“Nah. Just a guess. We don't win these cases clean, ever.”

“Good guess,” Barba demurred, because he'd heard as much through the formal chain of command. Perry was partially deaf in one ear, and would claim he hadn’t heard Detective Rollins mirandize him. It was a hail mary--and _bullshit_ besides--but the presiding judge was beloved by defense attorneys for erring on the side of caution. 

“I'll fight it,” Barba promised, and was--admittedly--offended when Carisi’s outlook didn't immediately brighten. In fact, the man stood, taking Barba's idle hand with him part way, so that it now rested on Carisi's thigh.

“This shit,” Carisi said, his tone lost beneath Barba's gaze and the weight of his own observation. It curled up on itself in ways Carisi could not allow of himself in the physical world. There was the notion of keeping cool, staying professional, but more than that--there was a great, gaping fear that if he let himself sink even an inch, he’d just as soon be consumed. 

“This _shit._ I must be a fucking idiot, because I'll never understand it.”

Barba didn't know what to say to that. He studied their cases, took them into the sanitized realm of a court of law. He was of a different mind on these things; _they happened,_ now what could he do? 

He’d be lying if he hadn’t searched the room for an example. Fin was stalwart, his resolve for the work some twenty-years old. Barba drew a comparison with Carisi and thought, _He doesn’t have that kind of time._

Rollins fed on righteous anger, tempering it with a healthy spread of vices and virtues. Hers was a full life, and she maintained it well. 

Benson had her own strength to draw from; when she and Barba spoke to their intersecting lines of work, she did not seek comfort from him, only reassurances that he would see the matter through to its natural end. That justice would be done. Barba didn't have to explain to _her_ of all people how these things could happen.

Carisi, neither, he decided. But the man didn't expect an answer--not really. He only hoped for comfort, to know that he was not alone in his upset, confusion, and heavy heart.

“Me neither,” was Barba’s simple admission. That, and an assuring squeeze that lingered on the man’s narrow wrist. “But that's just us, then. A couple of fucking idiots.”

-

The confession _was_ lost, the case _did_ go to court, and Barba didn’t feel so bruised by Carisi’s low expectations, now. 

The evidence was there, the story consistent. But nothing mattered less in a Special Victims case than the facts. _Perception_ reigned. If either party could twin their facts with the jury’s capacity to see either likeness or folly, they would be the victor.

Rollins--understandably upset in the fact that the confession she’d fought for and won was lost--gave Barba every detail into how it came to be, all but giving him an encore performance. Barba took his cross examination just shy of those places, hinting at but not saying outright what it was they all knew. He fell back, let Perry get just sure enough in his answers, then paced and turned, spoke and walked in circles, and generally made himself a point of distraction. Barba raised his tone and made snippy comments, drawing them back just before he was told.

He did what it was Rollins believed had set him off: being sharp and unrelenting. What Barba couldn’t mimic--Rollins’ soft beauty, her petite stature--he co-opted from around the room. He made sure to stand near--but not impede Perry’s view of--women in the jury, the stenographer off to one side, even Judge Carmichael, who looked appropriately severe in her robes, but who unwittingly did her part in the operation. 

For his own, Barba was nothing if not unrelenting. The promise he made to Carisi was at the back of his mind, because the forefront was bursting with strategy, fact, and purpose. 

To spill all and take it back put the defendant in an unnatural world. Barba wanted to bring him screaming back down to earth, to spare him nothing, to show as little concern for Perry’s psyche as Perry shown for his victim. 

Good intentions aside, Barba _loved it._ Dragging the truth out of liars, making sense of the senseless--he did these things with practice and tremendous effort, yes, but with his whole heart, too. 

Even when he sat, he performed: madly scribbling notes whenever Perry spoke with unwavering simplicity and dearness about a relationship that was anything but. Barba sighed, bored, during a tangential sob story Perry gave. 

And then there were his _legs._ Stretched out under his desk, crossed neatly at the ankle, Barba showed off a flash of softest lavender between the hem of his trousers and the sharp cut of his glossy black oxfords. It was a sweetness, and on a man Barba knew it read as superfluous. Needless, _needless purple._ Needless _trial._

He’d never admit to all the thought he put into a court appearance--not beyond the arguments he crafted--but nor would he dismiss an opportunity to make an impact on his case, however miniscule. Such was how he came to establish a reputation for winning cases: he did what the task demanded of him. 

(If he could submit himself to be choked with his own belt by a minor talk show host, drawing on a dashing pair of socks was child’s play.) 

When Barba began his cross examination, he played up his more effeminate tendencies, with a few added hand gestures he’d picked up from Carisi. As he spoke and leveled a damning line of questioning, he inched ever further along Perry’s last nerve, until--finally--Barba cut to the heart of the matter. 

A word towards intent. Another-- _entitlement_ \--was tossed like red meat before a predator. Every word, every gesture was a taunt. Barba tip-toed around the very matter Perry’s own lawyer had assured him the attorney was not permitted to go, yet _there he went._

Anyone would think Barba was having _fun_ as he moved about the courtroom, performing his duties like a raucous cabaret. They’d believe it, right until Barba resurrected the lost confession for the jury to hear anew, rising the wet, stinking corpse from its shallow grave and brushing the dirt from its features.

It was an ugly thing, and the jury took note. Those who had perhaps been swayed by Perry now looked upon him as though they were attending the wake of this hideous apparition. It was sinister, every color of wrong despite the handsome dressing and sad eulogies given for his privacy, his reputation, his life. 

And this, for Barba, was not fun. Any number of jurors could have swayed the verdict, had he not gotten his hands dirty. To think it could _ever_ happen meant it was always too close. 

Barba waited out the shock of the jury and Perry’s sputtering efforts to--again--take it all back. His expression fell far from satisfied, but to a place of deep disgust and resignation.

A man willing to lose himself once in an interrogation room was in dire straits before the court of law, and _hopeless_ before ADA Rafael Barba. 

Barba finished him off--nothing coy, nothing teasing. His questions teetered on accusations, but because they got red-faced, shouted answers, they were permitted. 

True, the man would be jailed, locked away in a cell for his crimes, but Barba wanted to _bury him,_ first. 

-

One round of celebratory drinks that evening quickly turned into two, then three, and after that the count got murky. Barba’s performance was lauded as one for the ages, though his reward was given long before the history books would have their say. 

He didn’t have to buy himself a single drink. 

The same privileged sense of untouchability that led Perry to his outburst in the first place was chased fast by cowardice, as he claimed in processing to have information on other crimes, and was willing to barter details for a shorter sentence. 

Barba had laughed at that outright, said there was only goodwill to be bought, and after his display in court, it would bear a heavy price tag. 

Perry gave it all up. 

So, with a solid conviction and future investigations pending, there was much cause for celebration.

Carisi was stupidly happy with the result, bright and beaming. He held his head high on Barba’s behalf, parading about as if this ranked with those Super Bowl outcomes with heavy financial rewards from years past. Barba didn’t know how Carisi refrained from spilling beer down the front of his shirt, for all his absurd grinning even while he drank. Furthermore, Barba wasn’t sure how Carisi didn’t spill over _him,_ considering their proximity. 

Carisi didn’t wander very far all night, though Barba wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d tapped out and left some confused patron to rest that ever-present hand on his shoulder. 

It was a gesture suggestive of pride and accomplishment, true, but not just for the decisive win. 

It was all Barba could do not to crane his neck and catch a view of themselves in a polished spread of mirror behind the bar, where his view of Carisi wasn’t obscured by the man’s own armpit. His long figure folded like a sapling, eager to give shade to its sole patron. There was an empty seat at their table, but it wasn’t near enough to Barba, so Carisi passed on it. In effect, he’d broken the neat collection of officers--Benson, Fin, and Rollins--to make his place at Barba’s side.

It was all Barba could do not to hush his company and greedily take in that image.

Even for being well on his way to drunk, Carisi chose his moments carefully. He waited until Benson fell into a conversation with Rollins and Fin before pressing in close, his nose all but buried in Barba’s hair. 

“Thank you,” he said, his breath hot and fragrant. “Really. For everything you did in that courtroom. I will go through the complete list, later.” 

Barba’s mouth twisted up into a smirk. 

“I look forward to it.”

“You were so good,” Carisi said, and Barba felt that friendly hand on his shoulder slide down the swell of his back. _“So good.”_

“Later,” Barba said coolly, because Carisi surely needed the reminder. 

-

Of their party, Barba and Carisi were last to leave. Barba chalked this up to the time Carisi spent denying he needed help at the urinal, or washing his hands, or putting on his coat. Every task required his labored attention, swimming though it was in a mind swamped in a mix of ales and lagers. 

It was an unmatched relief to finally step into the cold.

“Think you can sober up by Wednesday?”

“Might not… be possible,” Carisi said, and what an excellent find: Barba had discovered a true rarity in a slurring Staten Island accent that was some shade of divine. “What’s Wednesday?”

“The DA’s Christmas party,” Barba answered plainly. “Didn’t I mention it?”

“Yeah, I--I’m sober now. You wanna go, let’s go--right now. Here we go--”

“Keep it on the sidewalk,” Barba said as he watched Carisi very nearly miss a step off the curb. The lanky man swung back around, however, bumping into a double parked Buick, but otherwise without injury. 

Carisi waved him off and kept walking, as if he had a clear line of sight to Wednesday, to a party filled with Barba’s colleagues and a warm welcome for Carisi himself into that world. As he walked, he let rip a wild, drunken hoot; his excitement was palpable.

Barba smiled, but was swiftly overtaken by terror. It surged through him like a shot of amphetamines, and his skin prickled overtop its coursing path. He twisted around, certain that someone was behind him, that there was a real, physical threat to be reckoned with, and not solely the machinations of his own mind, winding him up. 

Blood pounded between his ears as he twisted right around, scoured the darkened street, and remained unconvinced even as his search came up empty. There was no one, and nothing, nary a sound except for Carisi’s staggered footsteps. Not even Barba’s own joined in, because he’d stopped, stricken.

He wished to pin his sudden, sickening bout of fear on the facts: they’d just left a cop bar, where Barba was sat with friends, yes, but there were backs of heads and figures awash in blue enough to get lost in. But that was an easy answer for a far harder question.

Maybe no one in that bar had looked and seen Barba as a target, but they saw the influence in his dress, the looks of admiration on others’ faces. And then they’d seen his company, hanging like ripe fruit off the jut of his broad shoulder. 

Those basest things Barba himself feared were all he and Carisi had--mere neediness, desperation, and proximity--surely found their place in the eyes of others. A year ago, Barba would have been grimly satisfied with that interpretation. 

_See?_

Now, it clenched the breath in his throat and held his tongue hostage. He didn’t seek to utter a word against it, lest he incite an argument. If the facts were laid bare, Barba wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t stammer and falter. 

Because the longer they did this, the less he found himself at ease with any prolonged absence, the more he questioned his right to have, to want, to _proceed_ as he did. 

Carisi made another delighted proclamation-- _Whoa! A cat!_ \--somewhere far ahead of Barba, and finally, Barba found the will to move. He jogged a ways, then slowed and came up alongside Carisi, taking the man by the arm under the guise of steadying him. In truth, Barba needed the reassurance. 

He reminded himself of what Benson had illuded to--they were quiet. And yet Barba feared reactions to what he’d built up in his mind as an entire _scene._ There were those who had ugly thoughts, and shared them, and Barba knew in those moments he felt nothing but anger, that shame did not touch his heart. 

It found him later, of course. It stalked him down a darkened side street and made him feel wary, and then disgusted, because who but a coward bought his own terror at the source? 

He wondered how Carisi would feel, if he was drawn into such an exchange. If Barba took him by the hand and all but led him there. If Carisi believed Barba set him up for it, no less.

To prove a point. To be _in the right._

 _He’d hate me,_ Barba though. _A little bit. Enough._

He told himself different. He told himself _better._

“Hey,” Carisi said, shaking his arm some to loosen Barba’s grip. He smiled again, soft and sincere. “You were so good today.” 

“You may have mentioned that,” Barba replied, his voice unnaturally tight.

“Better than good.”

“Alright.” Barba looked around for a street sign, and drew his phone out of his pocket with his free hand. “You want to go to my place or the drunk tank?” 

“I live four blocks away,” Carisi said, suddenly sounding more clear-headed than he had all night. “Raf. Come home with me.”

Carisi had picked the bar. Barba _should have known._

He jerked away, scandalized. 

“Come on,” Carisi whined. “Give me this. I’ve never picked up a hot guy from a bar and taken him home.” 

“And you never will,” Barba huffed. Nevermind the fact that he considered himself far too… _advanced_ in both age and reputation so as to allow himself to be picked up at a bar. There was also the little matter of having been outsmarted by a drunk Staten Islander to hinder whatever small part of him was hungry for exactly this. His pride found that scrap of desire and beat it into submission. 

Still--Barba saw the state Carisi was in and knew that he should go home. And while Barba maintained that place was with him in midtown, he relented. The only choice now was whether Barba would spend the night alone. 

Carisi’s smile was sly and cheeky. Even for being blitzed, he had a mind to be proud of the feat he pulled. 

And, _really,_ Barba couldn’t fault him that.

Barba looped his arm under Carisi’s again, and afforded himself to the other man’s balance. Keeping him upright was a task daunting enough for both. 

All too aware of the irony of asking this much from a man plastered out of his mind, Barba surrendered, said, “Lead the way,” while biting his lip so as not to add, _Because I’ve literally forgotten that you might exist anywhere else but with me._

“Calm down,” Carisi said, misreading the stiffness and unease radiating from Barba’s stalwart form. “You’re not walking into a futon situation, here.”

Then, with a horror borrowed from all his experience with Barba and Barba’s level of taste, Carisi reeled at the very thought. He clutched Barba’s arm and swore, “I’d _never do that._ I haven’t even owned a futon in _years._ ” 

Barba smiled--first strategically, and then with genuine feeling. The icy sense of being stalked thawed and sloughed off his shoulders. He felt lighter, even for having the weight of a grown man tugging on his arm. There was satisfaction in both: pull and release. Barba pocketed his free hand and stood taller to compensate for Carisi’s noticeable slump.

As Barba found he did indeed remember the way, and took lead of Carisi’s trotting steps, Carisi leaned in close enough that Barba felt the press of his jacket buttons through his own overcoat and into his side. And for all of two blocks, in New York’s creeping winter, Barba walked as if spring itself clung to the backs of his heels.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To you fantastic readers, I wholly and completely apologize for how long it takes between getting chapters out. I work two jobs and rarely have a day off between them, so my time to write is limited. I wish I was producing better work, too--I look back at previous stories and find the quality of writing a lot more involved and thoughtful than I am producing now, and the difference is partly this: I don’t get to sit and write for two hour stints anymore. All this is what I can manage on the bus or on breaks.  
> So I apologize for that. I’m disappointed by it. I considered abandoning this story until I had the time to invest and write like I want to, but in reality, I don’t see that happening.  
> Always hoping to get hit by a bus so I can be laid up in bed tho. #dreams 
> 
> Thank you for reading, as always. :)

This was how Barba decided to play it: self-possessed. Confidant. 

This was how he intended to look the part: Chilly greys and blues, he decided. Whites and patterns. Simple pieces rendered beautifully, with an artful and coyish play on the season, if not the holiday. 

And a statement piece, of course: one singularly handsome man at his side, with a striking profile and a goofy smile. 

The DA’s holiday party would be their first public outing on Barba’s end, and it was a rare enough opening on its own. ADAs were solitary beings, aware of one another and their work, but only casually. These holiday events were the most Barba saw of his colleagues for an extended period of time, and it was as fine an opportunity as any to make an impression outside the courtroom.

Barba intended to make a good one. 

He dressed semi-casual in charcoal grey slacks, a pristine white shirt, and a sports jacket. The latter was a thing of some whimsy and beauty: dark grey and flecked overall with white dashes that looked like he’d just come in from the snow. His suspenders were a muted navy, but there was a bright blue-and-white chevron pattern on his socks that Carisi appreciated, as well as a spotted pocket square which, from a distance, resembled white flowers budding amidst the dark winter motif of his jacket.

The outfit was eye-catching for its simplicity, but compared to the three piece suits of Barba’s day-to-day, the fact that he’d go out on a special occasion without so much as a tie was a touch disconcerting. 

Carisi, who was sat on the end of the bed watching Barba get ready, noted as much, saying, “I don’t wanna say you’re slumming it by comparison, but…”

“I’m off the clock,” Barba reminded him. “If I look like they’ve got me working all hours, it’s embarrassing.”

“They _do._ ”

“I know,” Barba hummed. There was no point in arguing; he had, after all, only arrived home half an hour ago--some two hours after most of his colleagues filed out. He straightened his jacket, lining up the lapels with the cut of his stark white shirtfront. 

With a deft hand, he buttoned his jacket and stood tall for Carisi to appraise the whole look.

“But tell me--do I look embarrassed?”

Carisi thought he looked _beautiful._

The words didn’t find his lips as readily as they flooded his mind, however. Even Carisi was surprised at his own silence. He served Barba well all the same, imparting a shy smile that belied his simple and complete adoration of the man, and Barba took that for the compliment it surely was.

There was no mistaking, either, the opinion Carisi held when he stood and sidled up to Barba, unbuttoned his jacket, and made a clear path for his hands to graze Barba’s sides before settling on his ass. 

Barba met him with a kiss, but nothing more. He wasn’t going to ruin the line of his slacks with unsightly strain from an erection. 

Carisi’s hands--now empty--found only his own sides, and the same three-piece suit he’d worn to work, with the exception of a fresh shirt. It was a sharp look that morning, but he worried after the day he’d put it through, and tried to remember if he’d had it dry-cleaned as recently as he’d hoped.

Barba hadn’t given him a great deal of notice with this party, after all, and Carisi had every intention of rolling up to Benson’s get-together in jeans and a hideous Christmas sweater, one with all manner of tassels and bulbs, a thing sure enough to keep baby Jesse entertained for the evening.

He hadn’t given much thought to how he’d look by Barba’s side. 

With no lack of nervous panic, Carisi implored, “Do I look okay?” 

Barba was much faster with his words--and generous--telling Carisi he looked distressingly handsome, far too good to parade around in front of stuffed suits like himself, and it wasn’t too late to send their regrets, if he’d prefer to spend the evening otherwise occupied.

“You said open bar at this thing, right?” 

“Mhm.”

“And you were going to introduce me around?” 

“Before you got to the open bar, was the general idea.” Barba gauged the outfit one last time, and imagined Carisi making the rounds, mingling with his colleagues. The prospect weighed more heavily on Barba’s heart than he’d expected, so he changed the view: Carisi, by his side, the two of them venturing through conversations and looks with all the ease of passing naked through water. 

“Fine. In that case, change the tie.” 

-

For the grand production made of getting ready, calling a cab, and departing Barba’s apartment, they didn’t get far.

Carisi ducked back into the building not a step yet outside of it. 

“Jesus!” he exclaimed at the sudden rush of cold. The temperature had dropped significantly since last he’d been out, and the wind had picked up, carrying with it a sharp spray of icy snow. Once tucked back further into the building, Carisi started to rearrange his scarf for better coverage. Barba sidled up to him, looking smug.

He gestured at his own layered attire.

“What did you expect, that I dressed like this because I think bulk is a good look for me?”

“ _Excess_ is a good look for you, I thought that’s what you were doing for.”

Barba watched Carisi try and make wool out of a wool blend. The boy was hopeless. 

“Do you want to borrow a coat?” Barba asked, already fishing his keys from his pocket. “Something made with a little more industrial strength than your average canvas tote bag?” 

They ventured back up to Barba’s apartment, where Barba made a beeline for the hall closet, his selection already in mind. Barba handed Carisi a beautiful black coat, heavy and fine, with a gorgeous Parisian collar. If it looked ostentatious, such was likely the case. And perhaps the coat was intrinsically better suited to Barba’s coloring, but Carisi took it gladly. He shed his lighter fare, which still held some bluster of cold inside. 

The coat was unmistakably Barba’s, and not just because the shoulders were a little wide and the length a touch short. Carisi would never own a piece of clothing that rivaled his rent in cost, but that was reason enough for Barba to do anything. The absurdity, the _gall._

The end result was severe in its darkness and sweeping length, but above all--a match well made. 

Still, Carisi hesitated.

“I dunno…” 

“Good God,” Barba said, marveling at either Carisi's unfounded doubts or the figure he cut--or both. “You look like you murder Russian dissidents.”

Carisi blushed some, and began buttoning and unbuttoning the coat nervously. He did this under Barba’s gaze, which could only be overwhelmed by the self-satisfied smirk upsetting the steady composition of his features. This was a smirk of some accomplishment.

“Thanks?” Carisi answered, but read every assurance in Barba’s roaming expression. He squared his shoulders and brought his voice down, saying smartly, “Comrade.”

Barba rolled his eyes. It was a full-bodied affair.

“And the moment’s gone.”

They didn’t have to walk far for their taxi, but Carisi was glad for the coat all the same. The warmth it afforded him was all well and good, but what really sold the thing was that Barba kept tugging at and straightening the hem of a sleeve and coming away looking appreciative. What a fine idea it had been, he seemed to say with only a smug turn of his lip, to see Carisi looking spectacular. 

So thrilled was he by this mere development--soft eyes searching for a flicker of recognition, agreement that Carisi felt as good as he looked--Carisi forgot all about the ball of nerves ricocheting around in his stomach. 

“So, uh, any advice?” 

He didn't get the question out until they'd crossed the threshold of an upscale bar with a shabby facade. 

He continued, sliding Barba’s coat off his shoulders and doing a thorough job of distracted Barba all the while, “For making a good impression?”

“You’re asking _me?_ ” Barba asked, and did not bother to hide his smile. He was undeniably pleased with Carisi’s sudden nervousness. Time and again, Barba was astonished by how little Carisi agonized over an event before its happening. He seemed perpetually eager until the exact moment it was too late to turn back. 

Barba was jealous of all the time saved.

Still, he couldn’t bring himself to let Carisi suffer the burdens of uncertainty even a moment longer. 

“Don’t give it a second thought,” Barba said, and held Carisi’s gaze long enough to confirm this was his honest opinion. 

“When have I ever?” Carisi said, a self-deprecating joke made in a voice Barba _supposed_ was meant to be an inexplicably smarmy version of his own. 

“What I really mean to say is, why bother?” 

This was a crowd that cared for the company it kept, even tangentially among its members. Careers and personal lives alike were ready wells for gossip. There was a reason, after all, that Barba could be counted on for two pieces of information when asked after his estimation of a colleague: their record and the last time they took a vacation. Both spoke to work ethic, but the latter hinted at something more.

Did they have a partner--a husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend--who let such a thing as a four-year dry spell stand? 

These details were teased out, and spoke to a person’s character. Barba took vacations but, for the longest time, there was no steady partner to speak of, and his performances in court spoke for themselves.

ADAs traded in the particulars as surely as they did jail time and plea deals. It was all fairly simple math; they were storytellers, after all, not statisticians. Give and take was the long and short of it.

“You’re here with me,” Barba said, laying the equation bare. “Either they already love you or hate you.” 

Carisi wasn’t soothed by that, so Barba tried again. 

“Or--whatever. Think of it as going undercover. Play a character. Liv tells me you’re eerily good at it.” 

Barba quite liked the wrinkled-nose look of bemusement that crossed Carisi’s face. He seemed just as put-off by the idea of not being his full self as being judged for it. Barba found that refreshingly paradoxical; he accepted one fully and the other not at all. 

“You think I’m playin’ you?”

“That presupposes that I think you _could._ ” 

Carisi shook his head lightly; no, he never could. 

“Enjoy yourself,” Barba said at last--an order. Carisi gave his best lopsided smile, a thing that brightened the whole of his face and took years from the man’s greying temples and perpetually-furrowed brow. 

“Uh-huh. Is that what you’re gonna do?”

Barba smiled gamely at the thought. Through the small lobby and cloakroom, he could hear music and laughter, and all the movement that afforded both, drumming in from the main hall. It was little more than a hum, yet to Barba’s ears, the implication--his superiors and colleagues, their spouses, and him, _walking into that_ \--was deafening. 

He looked to Carisi, who did him no favors looking a touch nervous, but who seemed happy, nonetheless. 

“You know, I just might.”

-

Barba led them through the bar, though Carisi couldn’t guess as to whether or not he’d frequented the establishment, previously. Barba was no stranger to nerves and stress, but he saved all that for casework and pinning down trial specifics. Making an entrance and holding his own as a figure of some interest were second nature to him now, after decades of practice. 

Even for dressing down--such as he was capable--in his stylish perfectly-cut pieces, Barba was surely the best dressed among the scene. Of those who tried to outshine him--and there were some interns, sons of wealthy fathers, who went lockstep in their Hugo Boss uniforms, and monochrome stylings of shirts and ties. Their tastes were expensive, but paltry; each suit was shinier and more mundane than the last. As for the runners up, only Carisi had his outfit appraised by the man himself. 

He liked those odds. 

Carisi took Barba’s advice and his obvious excitement towards the night--and the crowd, and the circumstance--turned to a readily accessible ease within the first twenty minutes of idle mingling. 

It helped that he came prepared with a great deal of respect for, knowledge of, and interest in Barba’s colleagues and the work they did. That much earned him quick points, but another factor weighed in his favor: intrigue. There was some genuine fanfare, and not just from Carisi. 

The party’s attendents weren’t simply a list of those down the line from the DA’s office--there were retired judges and those young upstarts using the office as a stepping stone, their gazes pitted elsewhere, usually towards political office. They were the curious few, but scads more were these: ADAs in all other boroughs, and even from as far as the pits of New Jersey. They had their own holiday parties, surely, but when word hit of where the _Manhattan_ DA would be hosting an open bar, they made the trip. 

Carisi found solace in those few individuals who worked in and around the courthouse--bailiffs, stenographers, even members of the security team. Carisi knew and liked these people, and they were likewise pleasantly surprised to have another familiar face in the crowd, and to see for themselves that the rumors were true.

The squirrelly detective had _indeed_ taken up with the silver-tongued, coffee swilling, sharply dressed workhorse. 

No, _really._

Carisi found he liked his place at Barba’s side, and thought he fit it nicely. He watched people clock Barba’s presence, their attention then shifting to his own, curious at first, then understanding, sometimes smug, other times even a touch appreciative. Perhaps it was only their suspicions being born out, but Carisi liked to believe otherwise. There was simple, even idle appreciation in the pair they made, and no small amount of that was first reflected by Barba himself, who held Carisi in some esteem. 

It took another twenty minutes for Carisi to realize it, but Barba wasn’t playing up that notion at all, much less teasing it out for Carisi’s enjoyment. His acknowledgements were sincere in their wording; Carisi was his _partner,_ his title of _Detective_ was worthy of sharing, and _they_ couldn't stay long, as _they_ had more than one social commitment that evening. 

“How many more do you think it’ll take until we reach the open bar?” Barba muttered to Carisi after winding up and letting rip yet another perfected introductory spiel. “Congratulations to all our fine participants. What a crowd.” 

“People are being nice,” Carisi countered. “Can you slow down and let me enjoy it for a minute?”

Barba blinked in surprise. He supposed he ought to have guessed Carisi would want to invest more of his time in Barba’s colleagues than Barba did. This was no annual hardship for Carisi; he’d never had to maneuver around intoxicated coworkers, holding a smile for three hours, and saying nothing when people tried to order for him and inexplicably guessed _mojito_ every time. 

“Of course,” Barba said. His tone--like the tight little smile he wore--was inexplicably cold. Carisi opened his mouth to question it, but Barba took him by the arm, turned him 180 degrees, and made yet another introduction. Carisi went through the motions, but all the while wondered if that was Barba’s game: to fill their time with an endless stream of pleasantries so narrow, Carisi would eventually tire of them, as well? Or if Barba felt Carisi wanted _only that,_ rather than any of what Barba hoped to have: hushed companionship amidst a raucous evening. 

But Barba pushed the conversation on, and drew Carisi into it, going off-script so as to foster some sense of initiative. 

Carisi wasn’t so surprised when Barba leaned in, said he’d be right back.

Said, _Enjoy._

Babra left Carisi to a conversation with one of his more senior colleagues, convinced Carisi would be _fine._ The man treated case law like history, and he had questions after motivations and unearthed detail. He was especially curious after the depth and drama amidst the dusty court proceedings of one era in particular. 

_Man, the **eighties,**_ he’d say, as though they were some bygone era in which he hadn’t been entirely well and whole, a child, running about, skinning his knees. 

Barba had left him in capable hands.

He wandered the space--a club, thick with leather and polished wood floors, all meticulously clean. There wasn't a squelch of shoe to unspoken mess to be heard--a true accomplishment in this city. He spied oil paintings pitted in heavy frames, many of them ships cutting through stormy seas. Others still were portraits of pointy-chinned British royalty, and Barba looked them in the eyes as he passed. 

He used the restroom--reason enough, should Carisi ask why he’d abandoned him--then wandered only part way back to the main, open hall pooling fast with his colleagues. 

Barba held back a step, sank his hip against a heavy, ornate door frame, and checked his phone. Before he could make too much of a dent in his e-mails, a hand clapped across his shoulder, accompanied by a familiar voice. 

“Barba, didn’t anyone tell you? It’s a party.”

Barba halfheartedly raised the flute of champagne he’d been given--same as everyone else, to toast the season--and brandished it with a similarly lukewarm smile. 

“No one’s working tonight but you,” Gil jested. “I can only assume you’re reading your own e-mails.” 

“Some of them are classics,” Barba countered. “‘Request for 9am filing’--a masterpiece.” 

He finally pocketed his phone and extended a hand to Gil, as well as a genuine smile. They were friendly enough, having only worked together for a few months after Barba made his lateral move for Manhattan. Gil was older, mostly retired now except for the odd case he took on for his son’s firm. He was affable--for a turncoat defense attorney. But he’d worked a long career for the City, once upon a time, and had always preferred it. Barba thought well enough of him, though he’d only ever known him as a man with one foot out the door. 

He had a mind for seafaring, too, and a terrible propensity for asking how Barba’s “people” felt about the open ocean, given “you know, everything.”

Even when they’d first met Barba--having heard it all before--didn’t spare Gil anything but the deserved response, a clipped, _“I really couldn’t say. My family came here on a Delta flight.”_

Gil had laughed deliriously at the line, invited Barba on his yacht that very weekend, and left Barba wondering if that, too, wasn’t a terribly out-of-touch line. 

But the yacht was real--a beautiful, streamlined vessel that found calm, clear waters well away from the City’s coast. Gil did more yachting than casework these days. 

So it really was his windswept, thinning hair got him through the door. 

“Good to see you,” Gil said.

“Good to be seen.”

“Oh-- _Christ, that’s right!_ \--Oh, Lord. _Shit.”_ As quickly as confusion crossed Barba’s face in response to Gil’s sputtering, it was traded in for embarrassment, the kind to pinch his features and hold his tongue captive as Gil carried on, spending his astonishment hand over fist. 

“I can’t believe it slipped my mind, there. Have we really not spoken since before all that madness?”

“I really wasn’t referring to anything--”

Gil waved him off. 

“When a couple of dirty cops very nearly blow your brains out, I think it colors the conversation, some.” Gil laughed nervously, as if he hoped Barba would interrupt, insist they’d all heard wrong, _it wasn’t that bad._ But no dismissal came; to Barba’s ear, Gil’s assessment was apt. 

“What an awful thing,” Gil continued. “I sincerely apologize for not reaching out to you.” 

Barba smiled easily. He had no use for apologies, now--especially not needless ones.

“You did. You sent flowers. Or--Kathy sent flowers.” 

Gil shook his head. “Flowers? No, no, that won’t do. I owe you a bottle of scotch. Unless you’ve gone and stopped drinking. People do that, sometimes. Confuse near-death with prolonged-death, and try to eschew the both of them.”

“No, I’m… gladly still drinking.”

To better prove his point, Barba raised his champagne flute. Gil did the same. 

“To a prolonged death,” Barba said, smirking. 

They observed the crowd for a moment, enjoying the distance and height afforded to them by the few steps between the raised hallway. 

“I met your friend,” Gil said, nodding absently. “Funny guy.”

Barba leveled his gaze over the crowd, seeking Carisi out, and finding him a head above the rest. 

“My partner, yes.” 

“This the same one from a while back? I’d heard--and I thought, _Barba?_ Never--but I’d heard some picture was going around?” 

Barba held his easy smile even while thoroughly dismayed by the terminology used-- _some picture,_ like his happiness was a much-whispered-after scandal. 

“One in the same,” Barba answered, deciding not to fight it. He could reason it was an entirely innocent photograph that had gained traction online, joked that if anything was out of step, it was that he hadn’t shaved, or was wearing a _baseball cap._ Barba said none of that. If Gil didn’t already know better, or perhaps thought worse, it didn’t matter. He’d approached Barba all the same, smiling his slow smile and slow dancing around his own thoughts. 

Barba seemed to remember his manners, then. 

“I don’t see Kathy--”

“We’re divorced,” Gil cut in, his voice still distractingly airy and light. He waved a hand as if to usher the surprise on Barba’s face right along. “Some of this stuff doesn’t make the rounds.” 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Barba said, though he wasn’t; Gil and Kathy had never been a good fit, even in the limited capacity in which Barba knew the couple. These events, for one. And like any old money family--Gil’s surname was shared with a few of the City’s more well-established ports--Gil and Kathy had a yacht, and the boozy weekend getaways they threw on them seemed to be their relationship’s crowning achievement. 

They never seemed to care much for the other’s company, not beyond having a titled associate: _Husband. Wife._

 _She was eleven years his junior,_ was a revelation that struck Barba particularly hard, though he quickly chased it out of his thoughts. 

“I like what you said,” Gil mused. “Partner.”

“It’s the word society obliges me to use, so…” 

“It’s good,” Gil said, unfazed by Barba’s dry sarcasm. “People should be that.”

Worried Gil would dig in his heels and draw from him every scrap of a thought he had towards the great, gaping notion of human compatibility, Barba knew he had to act fast. 

He’d talk for _hours_ if Barba let him. He’d start with the Greeks and meander on through time, leveling proclamations as he went. 

“It’s all the same,” Barba reasoned, though he knew he was only fooling himself. Things were always different with women--mainly due to the reception they garnered, in his case. Pleasant surprise and timid relief, usually. And if she was a stunner--and, really, Barba had always been charmed in that regard--then there were compliments heaved on him, like _he_ should be congratulated for his own dumb luck. 

People were all so inordinately _pleased,_ nevermind that his desires were no less an accident of fate than the bulk of his life. And never did his upbringing, education, or ambition garner him such praise. 

Only when it fell into patterns of _choice_ did Barba hear the raucous applause from the peanut gallery.

So everything was different, except for how Barba felt. In his mind, _every_ romantic entanglement held some possibility of partnership, until proven otherwise. Sometimes a night was all it took, or a conversation, a kiss. 

And sometimes it took years, and the threat of death, the ache of loneliness, the promise of friendship, and fostered hope for something more.

“Not when it’s right,” Gil insiste, picking the thought right out of Barba’s mind. 

Barba felt his cheeks darken. 

“Yes, well--”

He realized he needn’t be embarrassed; Gil had hit on a point, but not stuck around to see to his handiwork. He looked off, let his mind wander after that pleasant thought. 

“Do you think we ever get it right? Or just--right enough. Right away? Ha.”

“I see Kathy left you the pontificating.”

“And the yacht,” Gil said, which prompted Barba to soften his tone. 

He very much liked outings on that yacht. 

“I don’t know when it’s right,” Barba admitted. “I think _you’re_ right. You go as far as you can and see what it looks like at the end.” 

“We parted on fair terms,” Gil supposed. 

Barba spied Carisi across the room, hanging on the aged, bird-like Counselor Agatha Feinstein’s every word. 

“Then it was right.”

-

Carisi was pleased when Barba found his way back by his side. He was downright ecstatic when Barba took him by the crook of the arm and suggested they give Counselor Feinstein a chance to mingle. 

“Always on the prowl,” Feinstein agreed, and shuffled off.

“She’s wild,” Carisi said, as if Barba had no clue after his own colleague’s attitudes. A look of concern furrowed Carisi’s brow. “Shit, was I boring her? Was it that obvious from across the feakin’ room?”

“God, no, she loves an audience. And young men. You were probably the highlight of her night.”

Carisi smiled unabashedly at that. 

“Cool.”

“Come on. I need to get the taste of champagne out of my mouth.” 

Carisi’s smile turned haphazard before it sank into something petty and drawn. “Oh… you mean get a drink. At the bar.”

“ _Yes,_ I mean get a drink.” Barba narrowed his eyes and played to Carisi’s joke which, admittedly, dug into the corners of his mouth until they twisted into that unholy expression never meant to grace a man’s face after a certain age: a pout. “And get used to the bar. I may just abandon you there like a child at a theme park.” He gave an exaggerated salute. “Goodbye, you little shit.” 

Carisi laughed openly, causing a few nearby heads to turn. Barba wanted to be ashamed of his own silliness--the kind only Carisi could draw out of him--but he wasn’t. Couldn’t be, when he’d put pink in Carisi’s cheeks and light in his eyes. 

They ordered and awaited their drinks at the crowded bar.

Carisi turned back around and surveyed the scene. Barba liked that he was here to do so, and wondered fruitlessly what he’d be doing now if not by Carisi’s side, making catty comments for someone’s entertainment other than his own. He supposed he’d be at the mercy of anyone’s company, and worse--their questions. 

But that end was not avoided, not entirely. Instead, Carisi afforded Barba a whole host of _new_ questions--some he’d been asked yet, certainly--and by the very virtue of his presence, Barba escaped a possibility of renewed interest in the previous year’s ordeal. With more alcohol than sense making the rounds, people might lose their footing and fall under the impression that now was as good a time as any to dredge up the past to satisfy their curiosities.

“Did you meet everyone you wanted to?” Barba asked, and without waiting for a response continued, “I know you keep a list.” 

Their drinks arrived, and Barba pushed off the sleek bar top and walked a few paces, scotch in hand. Carisi didn’t miss a beat, falling into step right alongside Barba, and taking an easy swig from his beer. 

“I saw the DA,” Carisi said. “I didn't introduce myself.” 

“You can,” Barba answered at once. “If for some reason you… want to. Or I can.”

 _Indecision,_ Carisi noted with a wry little smile, because of course Barba had promised as much. That was a while ago, and somehow the meeting never came to be, never mind that Carisi had been in Barba’s office countless times, it being only two stories down and to the left of the DA’s westerly-facing corner office at 1 Hogan Place. 

Even here, all cloistered together in the same scattered bar, Carisi never felt further away. 

He shook his head, and found he begrudged Barba nothing. 

“Yeah, see, that's why I didn't. I get that he’s not for you like what the Lieu is for me.” 

Barba wasn't relieved--nothing so substantial so as to merit a name--but the thought charmed him all the same. 

“You're not wrong.” 

Carisi took another drink of beer, and when his mouth came off the lip of the bottle, he was smiling. “And anyway, I caught up with Bayard Ellis, so that's my night, made.”

Barba smirked. He didn't blame Carisi for his crush on the stately Ellis. _Call me Bayard,_ he’d say to everyone he met, and that unexpected warmth from such a towering legal legend drew them that much deeper into his orbit. 

“Good to know the pressure’s off,” Barba said, a cool word into the amber-colored warmth of his scotch. 

“Yeah, you can relax.”

Barba looked upon him, pleased and impressed. Carisi was always quick with a joke, but the attitude was a recent development.

Barba quite liked it. 

He sipped his scotch; all the better to hide his delight, and sour it besides. He did not like the feeling wholesale; it required a touch of something unnatural, a feasible delight from out in the world. That he might produce and process happiness by his own damn self would rattle the market he had for such feelings. 

“What time is it?”

Carisi answered him, but noted the handsome rolex on Barba’s wrist. He had to remind himself not to start in on what he’d long figured for Barba’s weakening eyesight; the man was unusually sensitive about it. 

As casually as he could muster, Carisi prompted, “Why?”

Barba didn’t buy the faint interest routine for a second, and for that reason alone didn’t bother to shell out any product. He answered honestly, saying, “I want you to look bored, so when we leave it's not presumed that I spirited you away like some kind of… morose pied-piper.”

Carisi pushed off the wall and rounded a step on Barba, all in an effort to better look at the man when he asked, “Where do you come up with this stuff? Seriously.” 

He waited a beat, thinking Barba might actually answer him. Barba didn't, and Carisi relented. Though, he breached decorum all the same, spilling a sigh out into the space between them--his own non-answer, if Barba was suddenly going to be so tight-lipped. 

For all the discussion they’d shared as to perception and due diligence--those finer points of being out Carisi still fumbled with--Carisi felt as though he knew exactly the sentiments Barba held.

_You don't understand how it **looks.**_

It should have sounded ferocious, given that it was Barba, and he felt wronged. But Carisi imagined the words spilling plaintively, and with quiet enough to reason for a whisper. 

So well before annoyance set in, or frustration, Carisi was touched by a profound sense of sadness. Barba was still, in his way, curtailing the view others had of them, and cutting any lines of interest off at the knees. He did this studiously, with some eye as to best practices. He didn’t want to dwell over the notions sloshing around in others’ heads; he only meant to stifle how he believed they would surely play out. 

A keen eye for the intents and stances of others remained his best defense.

Against _what,_ specifically, Carisi remained uncertain.

He didn’t ask.

They stood together, close, observing the room. Barba pointed people out, stating what he assumed was Carisi’s curiosity: their hallmark cases, winning techniques, miserable pitfalls. But Carisi was watching _him,_ because Barba himself held his interest like the force of gravity. 

Carisi was always weak to his pull; he gave himself over to it entirely. 

Barba stopped talking--not because he thought he was losing Carisi’s interest, but because the physicality of Carisi’s presence was dizzyingly distracting. It was just the length of his arm, and occasionally his hip when he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The scent of his cologne--something sharp and clean--was readily available for enjoying, should Barba so incline his head and breathe deep. 

And though there was no overlooking them--a favorably stylish pair, Barba’s whole self standing stark and polished against the faux-aged walls and Carisi, his suit spelled in dark enough tones to merit camouflage, but his ever shining bright eyes and keen smile giving him well away--Barba liked to imagine they could have been. For just a moment he let himself entertain the notion of sinking into the background, of being _present,_ yet decidedly unaware of his own presence. That they could relax, and drink in the scene, rather than Barba feeling like an ill-fitting part of it, and hoisting those notions on Carisi.

Barba rolled his shoulders, maneuvering through the tightness that inevitably found them several times a day. He cast a wayward little smile at Carisi, who returned it, and together they enjoyed the moment for what it was, and registered the total _banality_ of sharing in a work function, and doing so because it was what they could expect of one another. They’d only guessed at it, previously, but now they had proof: there was greater enjoyment to be had in seeing through an event such as this by one another’s side.

Carisi checked his watch again, and shot Barba a sort of hapless smile after the fact.

In turn, Carisi watched as Barba’s jaw twitched, and he bent his head slightly--either in reverence to some awful thought visiting him like a heavenly spirit, or in anticipation for another swig of scotch. 

“Don’t,” he said simply, and took that drink of scotch. 

Again, Carisi felt as though he knew the man’s words without him having to speak them.

_Don’t participate in this just because I ask. Because I tell you to. I’ll--_

_Stop._

His expression was tight, aggrieved. He was hard pressed for the words to see him out of the pit of his own making, and the facts were abhorrent to him, laid out without the trappings of his own reasoning. If they could not hide, Barba would obscure them. If there was so much known of them--their vacation destinations, the smiles they wore together--then Barba would spirit them away, and do so under imagined duress.

No, it was worse: Barba would excuse himself from the picture entirely, and hang their departure on _Carisi's_ feigned boredom. 

It was a quietly obscene deed, made worse because it lacked the excuse of being thoughtless. 

When the expression across Barba's face finally registered as disappointment, Carisi was quick to act. He delivered an elbow to Barba’s side, joined it with an effort to point across the room with the hand he held his beer with, and asked after a woman in a genuine _gown._

“We’re not leaving until you tell me who _she_ is.” 

It took Barba exactly seven seconds to realize this was Carisi acknowledging Barba's fault and forgiving him all in one instant. Relief stitched itself between Barba’s brows and shone through the smile he bit into with his teeth.

_“Well,”_ Barba began, and was positively glowing with pride that Carisi would indeed spy the most interesting person in a crowd, and give Barba platform on which to spout all that he knew. “I'll tell you this: last year, she was somebody's mistress. This year, she's living in a highrise condo with that man's _wife._ ” Carisi looked less thrilled with that than bemused--and maybe even a touch pitiable--and Barba supposed there was no accounting for taste. “She runs a children's charity, I think.”

Carisi nodded, seemingly satisfied. His expression brightened as his eyes locked on a figure approaching from behind Barba. 

“Yusuf, hey!” 

“Counselor. Detective.” 

_Like-minded_ was the word Barba had used to describe Yusuf to Benson when he’d organized it so any cases on which Carisi was the lead detective would go through him. If Barba was completely honest with himself, the only reason he hadn’t said _closet case_ was that much the same could be said of him, to a degree. 

But Barba liked Yusuf, and understood his situation to be much like Carisi’s: it was shaped by family and religious leanings, and Yusuf didn’t see himself as the kind of person who would turn his back on either. 

He’d said as much when Barba had approached him months ago, his Boston sunburn not yet browned over into a tan. The way Yusuf had looked at him when Barba said he needed to afford both himself and an SVU detective a little distance was a strange mixture of fortitude and wonderment.

He’d agreed immediately, of course. Whether he’d been enticed by the prospect of Barba owing him a favor or simply gratified to be thought of for the task of carrying the man’s name and reputation--and eventually holding his own alongside it--Barba didn’t know. Perhaps _Yusuf_ didn’t know, given that his first and only comment on the matter was, _“So you are, then. Dating this man. Openly.”_

“I am,” Barba had answered, and after the fact would reason that his smart mouth held a forked tongue, because in the same breath as he asked a favor, he’d delivered a shrewd insult. _“I can’t tell: are you disappointed or jealous? Because you don’t have to be.”_

To Barba’s surprise, Yusuf had laughed. Nothing full-bodied, but a wistful thing that made Barba think of tin cans trailing behind a newlywed’s car: absurd, but sweet. 

He said, “When my father passes, perhaps.” 

That was when Barba knew he could trust Yusuf as well as like him.

“Why wait?” Barba had asked, and felt the unsettling click in his jaw, the drag of broken and healed bone, remnants of that final, bitter exchange. The grueling effort was understood, and neither man spoke to their reasons again.

The treaty held as they traded polite smiles and seasonal well-wishes.

“You just getting here?” Carisi asked, eyeballing the heavy coat Yusuf wore over his suit. The very same, Carisi noticed, that he'd been wearing earlier that day. And Barna was right: the implication of being overworked was there in abundance, even without Yusuf confirming it aloud. 

“Heading out, actually. I have court in the morning.”

His quiet, unhurried voice always reminded Barba of someone talking to children, and he supposed Carisi had a similar takeaway, given his unfounded concerns that Yusuf thought he was a moron. 

“Smart man,” Barba said, remembering the first decade of his career when he could be counted on to work through every holiday. Yusuf had a different excuse--Christmas wasn't _his_ holiday--but he didn't pooh-pooh the impression he was a hard worker, either. 

He was, however, a consummate ally. Even with a foot out the door he'd turned back to relay word of a coming threat.

His voice still the definition of serene, Yusuf said, “Just thought I’d tell you, Becky is on patrol.”

Barba was rolling his eyes even before Yusuf got the whole name out. 

“Oh, I need a stiffer drink.”

“Like what, cement?” Carisi teased, and looked to Yusuf to share in his delight. Yusuf only betrayed a slightly strained smile--it wasn't polite to laugh at a higher ranking colleague. 

And it was surely career suicide to laugh at _Rafael Barba._

“Who’s Becky?” Carisi asked after Yusuf had gone. Like Barba’s attempt to orchestrate boredom, this was a little play of his own: not asking Barba simple questions in plain sight. He had to pretend, sometimes, that Barba included him in more of his day than Carisi himself got to see, or of which he was a genuine part. There were office politics that spilled like floodwaters from the breakroom or email threads, and Carisi was blind to all that Barba did not see fit to share.

“Social Committee,” Barba said, dragging through the answer like sludge. “Self-proclaimed.”

Carisi shrugged; being friendly was hardly a crime, yet Barba had spat her name like she was the SoHo Strangler. 

“She’s the DA’s assistant. And spy.” Carisi rolled his eyes at that, so Barba elaborated, “She's nosy. And a gossip.”

“So are you.”

“Yes, but she doesn't do it with _finesse.”_

“And what’s talking behind people’s backs without finesse?” Carisi teased, and jutted a hip out to bump against Barba, who remained stalwart in the face of joyful whimsy. 

_“Exactly,”_ he sniffed, feeling utterly indignant now that he thought about it. He spotted Becky's perky little nose in the air, a thing that gained greater height than even her latest pinterest-inspired updo. 

“Straighten your tie,” Barba told Carisi. “Smile. Relax.”

Becky darted through the crowd, cutting through conversations and snapping photos with her phone, a thing that looked like a pink brick in its brand name case. Like a fish, she was lured to another couple, first, drawn in by their easy smiles and laughter. She fed on those things until they were gone, replaced by overwhelmed expressions as she shared unnecessary details and news after the goings-on in the rest of the room. _Who_ was dining with _whom_ and why hadn’t _someone_ arrived yet and what did it all _mean?_

When she met Barba and Carisi, she arrived first with her phone’s camera. Her pronounced smile came second.

“How about one of this… lovely… _couple?”_

She ended on a question, pitched high and curious. Carisi thought Barba might sniff in disdain and turn away, leaving her with a curt word as to where she could put her camera. Instead, Barba snaked his arm up behind Carisi, bringing a hand to rest comfortably on his shoulder. He fixed a smile on his face that was made of every assurance he did not innately possess, but that he’d seen out in the world, liked, and mimicked well enough to fool others.

“Well are we or aren’t we lovely, Becky?” 

“This one, maybe,” Becky said, not appreciating Barba’s acidic tone. She snapped a photo, nonetheless. 

Carisi gave her an even brighter smile, afterwards. 

“Sonny Carisi. I don’t think we’ve met.” 

Becky shook his hand and shot Barba another look, something overloaded with imagined familiarity and a playfulness shallow enough to leave an unattended toddler in. Carisi caught Barba’s pronounced eye-roll, though Becky missed out, keen as she was on Carisi’s genial handshake and pincushion dimples. 

“And you’re a detective, right? With Manhattan Special Victims some… four years now? And a recent graduate of Fordham law?”

“And a Pisces…” Carisi added on, jokingly continuing her veritable haul of information. “Is this like a magic trick? You’re not gonna pull my Social Security Number on me, too, are ya?”

“Well, Mr. Barba here is so tight-lipped about you, I had to do some digging.” She wasn’t fool enough to extend her imagined familiarity to Barba’s first name, Carisi noted, and breathed a sigh of relief on her behalf. 

Her eyes bright, her mouth puckering with delight, she continued, “Come to think of it, no one here would even know you _existed_ had it not been for that _darling_ picture! After that, any idiot could put it together.”

Barba made a soft, amused noise. Carisi cut eyes at him, _praying_ Barba did not say exactly what it was he was so clearly thinking: _Any idiot **did.**_

Luckily, Barba drained that sentiment from his glass. He held that position, crowding his sour expression with a drink harsh enough to befit it. Carisi saw his frustration with Becky for exposing his silence--what was _surely silence,_ practiced like the religion he detested, held like the prayers he never recited--and believed it to be, strangely, a tribute. 

The anger, not the silence. The silence, Barba did for himself. It was no feast but it sustained him, fed his buckling inclinations towards respect and competence he wished to both receive and project within the institution he served. His _embarrassment,_ though.

Carisi imagined what he was seeing emerge now--whole and towering--was a thing of some tedious construction. Becky’s chatter only served to narrate a timelapse of all the things Barba believed he’d done in service to Carisi’s being by his side. The things he’d said or done but artfully kept from misconstruing ears and eyes. 

_She doesn’t know,_ was the opinion Carisi read on Barba’s furrowed brow. _Don’t believe a word she says._

_Not… every word she says._

She started talking. At first, Carisi didn’t understand the point; she was telling _their own story_ to _them,_ as if for no other reason than to boast all that she knew. She added her own personal turns, suggesting much the same thing had happened to her cousin--with the exception of the death threats, protection detail, popularized vacation photo forcing a kind of _coming-out_ coming-out for a respected ADA who was never quite _in._ The cousin, as far as Carisi gathered, had only been sleeping with her boss and accidentally shared a nude photo on Snapchat.

The similarities began and ended with sex and perceived shame. 

Carisi was a little embarrassed he’d never quite understood all Barba’s naysaying, until it was spelled out for him in someone else’s words, his own life laid flat and linear, made into a narrative for quick and giddy consumption. It didn’t sound like the blessing Carisi privately thought it was--Barba would laugh at him if Carisi called him that--but rather, the salacious tale Barba kept telling him. 

Beside him, Carisi saw Barba only in glances: downing his scotch, checking his phone, looking idly around the room. Mentally, he would not be consigned to a conversation he did not want. But then why stand there like he did, shoulders squared and chin raised, posed and poised and perfect?

Carisi reminded himself she was the DA’s eyes and ears, even if only by her own telling. Maybe she overstated things, or maybe there was power enough in her idle chatter to lodge into her employer’s mind. 

Carisi thought Barba would have risked the icy departure he so dearly wanted to deliver had circumstances allowed--that is, had he doubted Becky’s claims, or damned the consequences, or damned _Carisi_ for being there to complicate them. 

Still, Carisi didn’t know what it was Barba worried might happen if his name was floated around a few unkind words, especially among this crowd. He suspected Barba was content hoarding those concerns himself, and not sharing the burden.

And maybe it was that simple: Barba didn’t want to give Carisi the opportunity to worry like he did, to chance his reputation snowballing into something unrecognizable to him, or those who knew him best. Because, in Barba’s mind, there was still hope that Carisi would break from convention, abandon his tin, and venture into this very world where reputation went hand-in-hand with the work. It was a human business; even the weakest conviction rate could be salvaged by a fine reputation, and a poor one could torpedo a legend.

Even if Carisi chose that path, it was a future endeavor. He found he had to smile, then, considering the distance Barba was willing to extend his concerns. How far ahead was he thinking about Carisi’s prospects, and did he see himself among them? 

It was a thought Carisi meant to delve into, to indulge in like a feast. 

With the incessant soundtrack of dropped names and interwoven tales of office politics playing out before him, however, it was surely a lost cause.

At minute six Carisi couldn’t take it anymore. And despite Barba’s instruction, he did it all: checked his watch, looked mildly bereaved, and played every hapless undercover ploy he knew, like they were a deck of cards fanned out in his hand. 

He made Becky feel gracious about letting them off. For his grand finale, Carisi dazzled with his own self-taking abilities, insisting Becky be on the other side of the camera, which thrilled her to no end. Carisi didn’t need looking back at the picture to know Barba was looking right at him, his smirk a thing of beauty, his glass of scotch raised as if he’d gone to the bar to fill it with pride and it was spilling like a fountain. 

Barba took him by the arm. 

They made their escape. 

-

Their slow departure was slowed by still more handshakes, brief hellos and introductions, and as they passed increasingly ruddy faces and jocular speech, Carisi got the feeling the upper echelon would continue their party in private. In another tier of the bar, perhaps, secreted away behind still more weathered seascapes. He thought, too, that Barba had an open invitation if he wanted it. He was cool and confident, never dropping a name or fumbling a greeting. He held conversation, keeping it taut and fine.

And Carisi’s name in his mouth was a _song._

These were formal introductions, because for many in the room, Carisi had been of passing familiarity for some time. Barba’s colleagues surely recognized the lanky man at Barba’s side, in his office with lunch, walking and talking with him outside on those pleasant days when the sun beat down on the pavement and they matched sunglasses with their suits. 

Or else they recognized him from the singular instance of Barba allowing someone to shadow him. 

Or the singular instance for which they’d known Barba to smile so broadly, and were given photographic evidence, to boot. 

In retrospect, they should have known: this boy was something special. 

All this registered on Carisi’s face as a quiet smile dipped and shone at the floor. He felt on the verge of great peels of laughter, but doubted he could drag any possible sense out of his own explanation. 

He was happy, and if he said so, he was sure anyone who knew him would frown and wonder, _what were you before?_

Carisi spied the Mayor of New York coming through the double doors as they collected their coats. He was flanked by a few aids, and his security discretely eked in ahead of him. That much, Carisi noticed first: procedure. The way a trained eye moves about the room and a body follows. Carisi elbowed Barba so hard in the side to point this out, Barba very nearly returned fire.

Carisi got a passing handshake from the politician, more the product of his wide-eyed staring than his genial hello. 

They were two feet out of the bar and onto the sidewalk when Barba rendered his verdict on the evening’s festivities.

“That was painfully dull.”

Aghast, Carisi all but threw another arm into Barba’s side. 

“Are you kidding? I met the Mayor!” His argument--though impassioned--did not sway Barba’s opinion any. “I know you guys feel him breathing down your necks in the DA’s office, but come on.”

“Check my pockets?” Barba asked absently, his eyes on his phone.

It took a moment, but Carisi realized Barba meant the borrowed coat’s pockets. He found nothing, and showed his empty hands.

“Oh, I thought there’d be ticker tape. You could have thrown yourself a parade.”

Carisi had learned long ago that the best way to ruin one of Barba’s smug jokes was play like he enjoyed it, so he swung an arm across Barba’s shoulders and pressed a sloppy kiss against the man’s cheek. 

“People think we make a good couple.”

“Someone tell you that?” Barba asked, then teased, “The Mayor?”

“Someone _did,_ but no one _had to.”_

“I'm glad you feel that way.” 

The acrid undercurrents of Barba’s honeyed sentiment clicked slowly, like the teeth of two cogs biting clean into place. 

Carisi felt his heart get pulled into the trap. 

“You got that too, right?” 

“I am trying,” Barba began, his tone still too-sweet, “Not to care.” 

Carisi dragged his feet to a stop, then folded his arms and waited dead center of the sidewalk for Barba to come back around with a reasoned answer. If nothing else, he was a stickler for poor streetside etiquette. He herded Carisi out of the way of those few bundled passersby. 

And best As he could, Barba explained the art of living in sustained emotional mediocrity. 

“As good as it may feel to bask under a stranger’s idle smile and kind words, any hint of disapproval or,” Barba paused, held his tongue so as not to say what it was he meant to: _disgust._ “Any… assumed familiarity that goes with it, doubles down, hits you twice as hard.” 

“You're not being fair to yourself,” Carisi argued. “Because not feelin’ anything either way is never an option. You _always_ see the bad, it _always_ hurts. You just as soon as get angry.”

“Anger,” Barba said lightly, “Is my baseline emotion.” 

Carisi shook his head, but was smiling. He never believed any harsh word about Barba through and through, much less those he uttered of himself. The very idea read like a bad joke. 

“I don't get it. How can you think you're a cynic? You're, like, the smartest guy I know.”

Barba loved an unintended compliment, and carisi swung them wildly about. Dead cats, like they say. And the recognition was it's own gift; it stirred in Barba the thought that Carisi had infected him with his joy, no matter how little of it rose to his surface. Of this, Barba was sure: Carisi was in his blood. He was a transfusion of light and goodness. 

“I believe you've answered your own question.”

“No, cynicism is too easy. Cynicism and--and _despair._ You don't do that. You’re not easy.”

Barba narrowed his eyes. That was a touch delicate, and much too _rich._

“You thought I was going to blow you at a work function.”

“And you _didn’t,_ ” Carisi reminded him, and halfheartedly pumped a fist into the air. “Yay?”

 _Light,_ Barba thought. Blinding light. 

_Goodness, goodness me._

Carisi took a moment, felt the cold air on his skin, felt Barba’s soft gaze resting on him, as surely as though proximity afforded it physical weight. He stuffed his hands into his-- _Barba’s_ \--pockets, looked around. 

“The Lieu’s place isn’t far from here. You want to walk?”

Barba stared down the lamp-right spotted street and heaved a dejected sigh. 

“If you’re making a play to keep that coat on the basis that you’ve worn it more than me…” 

Carisi smiled and shook his head; nothing so definitive as a “no,” but it would do for his purposes.

“You wanna know my angle, here?”

Barba leveled Carisi with a dull-eyed stare, one that spoke to an evening kicked off with warm champagne and tedious smalltalk. It was joined by an arm drawn akimbo, and lips licked then pursed. He needed to be impressed. 

Carisi took Barba’s hand in his own, interlocking their fingers as best as twin sets of gloves would allow. 

Very plainly, he wanted to walk a few City blocks under a flat winter sky holding Barba’s hand. His simple smile and accompanying shrug told Barba exactly that. 

“Absurd,” Barba huffed, but kept pace with Carisi as they started walking. 

Carisi gave him a defiant little squeeze. 

“Yeah, you would say that.”

“Someone’s feeling himself tonight.” Barba said, but of course he couldn’t complain--he was the sole beneficiary of the runoff. Every swell of pride Carisi generated, Barba felt, too. It took some getting used to--all that unabashed joy, roiling around like ocean waters under a hurricane. Barba saw Carisi having the time of his life, but always worried for letting go, for finding bliss and losing it only seconds later.

Because that was joy as Barba knew it: fleeting. That’s what made it sweet and stirring. It couldn’t be held. 

For all his silent pontificating, Barba couldn’t help but tease: “The effects of a run-in with Bayard Ellis, as it were.” 

“What can I say? The man’s a living, breathing aphrodisiac.” 

“And nothing says stimulated passion like a rousing three blocks of hand-holding.” 

“We could take the long way, see what happens.”

A sly smile threatened to break free of the twisted little smirk Barba wore. His teeth wanted to shine and strike out into the cold, to bear the moment fully. What good sense had Barba lost that Carisi’s cheesy flirting still thrilled him? 

“Well listen to _you._ ” Barba watched as Carisi glowed under his praise. “Is this champagne on an empty stomach, or something I have to look forward to later?” 

“Now, why’s it gotta be one or the other?” 

And Barba thought, if they didn’t hit up a liquor store on their way home, he’d regret it for the rest of his life.

As they closed in on Benson’s apartment building, Barba felt someone watching them well before he eyeballed the suspect. Or else it was a trick of perception, wherein his mind excused the adrenaline that surged through his veins at a moment’s notice, sent it running back and claimed it wasn’t a flashflood, that the stream had always been there. 

“Dr. Huang,” Barba said as a passing figure, recognizing the man even under a heavy overcoat and knit hat.

“ADA Barba,” Dr. Huang replied, his smile easy even if their acquaintance wasn’t. Barba only knew Huang as a shill for a weak defense, and would surely tell him as much. He didn't know the kind, quiet man Benson had grown to know, trust, and respect. 

Admittedly, Huang had a ready likeability about him. There were his handsome features, certainly, but more pressing were his pleasant voice and easy demeanor--not things Barba often registered from an FBI agent, and back when the death threats were just catching up to him-- _before they knocked down his door_ \--he had met a few. 

Soft eyes traveled to Carisi, settled there.

“And Detective--Carisi, is it? Sonny?” 

Carisi was won over by the uninstructed use of his nickname, _of course._

“Yeah, hey, I've heard a lot about you. Great to finally put a face to the stories.” 

Finding his hand was unexpectedly freed, Carisi reached it out to meet Huang’s.

“Did we miss the party?” Barba asked, accepting a brief handshake after Carisi had gone and started a whole _thing._

“Most everyone's there,” Huang answered, and briefly explained his reason for leaving: a flight scheduled in the early morning hours. That could have been the end of it--their interaction, finishing as plainly as it started--but a genuine smile tugged at Huang’s lips, because the sight he was privy to here on a darkened street was familiar to him in some ways. Two men, their hands clasped, only to part like halves of the Red Sea when faced with a witness. 

Dr. Huang was wise enough to appreciate the familiar, and didn’t flock only to the pleasant. 

“I suspect you'll make something of a grand entrance,” he said, and watched with dismay as Barba’s expression tightened, and he withdrew--not physically, for he did not sacrifice an inch, but a part of him had turned heel and gone. 

“Meaning?”

“Meaning your friends are very eager to have you in their company.” 

_“Meaning?”_

If possible, Barba’s tone was icier the second time around.

“...you’ve been quite the topic of conversation. All good things.” Huang smiled brighter than he felt inclined at that juncture; Barba was agitated, annoyed and then some. A situation had arisen from innocuous pleasantries, and Huang was left wondering where all his acumen for the inner workers of the human psyche had gone. 

But then, Benson had said Barba was one of a kind.

“I’d ask how that makes you feel, but that… seems obvious.” The joke--much like Huang’s initial effort to extend a compliment--didn’t land. “Sorry. Just a little psychiatry humor…” 

Awkwardly, Huang gave up and implored, “You have my word--”

Barba regained composure. It came in tandem with a look of pinched dismay that gathered just above his right eyebrow and blanketed over his features. He quickly willed any lingering suspicion from his face and voice. 

He interrupted, “Yes. Of course. I misunderstood.” 

The moment stood isolated in time, like a great pillar set between the three of them that all could reflect on in wonder. There were different sides to be seen: one of them glossy, another painted white and dull, and still more left rough and unfinished, which made them all the curiouser for being propped out in the world. 

A tree, uprooted. 

And Barba was the issuer of both bark and bite, because the man who’d paid the pair a compliment had now--mere moments later--attempted to issue an apology. 

Huang glanced briefly to Carisi, and on the younger man’s face, he read sadness on Barba’s behalf.

Huang knew _that_ look.

“Have a pleasant holiday,” he offered, and side-stepped the two. 

Carisi, unwilling to let the conversation waste and die so spectacularly, replied over-brightly, “You too, doc. Thanks.” 

The accusation that followed wasn’t blurted out or bandied about for anyone to hear. It came slowly, quietly, and after some genuine consideration--this, spent as they walked a few slow steps up towards the building in perfect silence. Carisi tried his damndest to find an answer himself before putting it to Barba in hushed trepidation: “What the hell was that?”

It was the only question to ask, yet Barba looked even more perplexed for hearing it.

“I have no idea,” Barba said, looking genuinely mystified. He was that, if not _mortified_ that he might come across as closeted or paranoid or ashamed--and for what? Word that his presence was anticipated, and Carisi’s along with him, that together they should be a welcome sight? 

He’d heard only that he was a topic of discussion, ignoring the sticking point: his name was being bandied about among friends. 

“I--” Barba left it there. He turned, jogged to catch up with Huang before the man crossed the street. 

And though his instinct was to give chase, Carisi held back. He even bit his tongue, because the pavement was dark and there could be ice, and shouldn’t Barba slow down, watch his step? 

He thought about shouting something of the kind, but imagined Barba’s head twisting back to show off his unimpressed sneer, leading to lost balance and a cracked-open skull. Carisi shuddered to think he’d come around to see things as Barba did: wholly imagined, yet still touched with fatalism. He tried to reason on Barba’s behalf that it was a coping mechanism: anticipate the worst, and even a sorry outcome--usually--wasn’t a death sentence. 

Except, Barba never put action behind those thoughts, or even believed a lick towards their inevitability. After months of a light, lyric voice relaying the bleakest of possibilities, Carisi was slowly approaching acceptance that Barba got nothing out of his black humor; it was simply inherent. He basted in it, his life initiated by unease and disappointment, and forever saturated in their memory.

There was no catching and revealing it; Barba’s own attitudes were no secret to himself. Carisi’s only choice, then, was not to take part. Privately, he suspected Barba enjoyed Carisi’s optimism, even came to rely on it when he couldn’t summon as much from himself.

So Carisi hung back, a foot in the door, and resigned himself to craning his neck and squinting into the intermittent spells of streetlamp light to better observe the scene.

They were positioned such that Carisi could see Huang’s face as he listened to Barba’s harried explanation. Huang remained impassive, then thawed. He smiled, spoke in response, and Barba’s shoulders relaxed from their anxious hunch. A whole scene choreographed to perfection, They shook hands again--an effort of Barba’s initiation.

Barba’s walk back towards Carisi was practically a stroll. The intensity that had driven him away did not lead him back, and though Carisi was glad for the change, he understood even less the transformation. 

“Raf--” Concerned touched those hard consonants and made them honied and soft. An invitation, really, for what Barba did next.

Barba kissed him--chaste, but resolute. 

“It’s fine,” he said, breath close enough to pass into Carisi’s slackened mouth and be used again. Barba took half a step back, ran a thumb over the corner of his own mouth, and was presentable once more. 

“Shall we?” 

Cold air cut away as he took the door from Carisi’s grip and closed it neatly behind the two of them, his own legs positioned well between Carisi’s to make the tight angle work. 

He was through the door and halfway up the first set of stairs when Carisi found his voice.

“Raf, seriously--hold on. Talk to me.” 

Barba didn’t know what to say, though words had come effortlessly when facing the doctor a second time: _That was--embarrassing. I’m sorry. You’re a professional, so I won’t insult you by pretending you didn’t clock the paranoia._

The apology was easy because even though Barba didn’t think he represented himself well in that moment, he’d done so honestly. He didn’t like to see the product of his doubt out in the world, registering on the faces of others, hanging between words of a threadbare conversation. More than that, he didn’t like to recount those moments for posterity. 

So there was an apology to be voiced, and whether Huang heard it or Barba said it silently to himself, it emerged fully formed in his throat. 

“What did he say? What did _you_ say?”

“I thought he was being cute with me. He wasn’t.” Barba said this, thinking he could sidestep the question by describing the situation. 

“No, yeah, you overreacted. I _got that._ But you did it in the face of, like, twenty words.” Barba’s move was a classic evasion tactic, and Carisi didn’t need to be a practicing attorney to spot it.

He was a cop. That afforded him a different set of skills. 

So Carisi, realizing he wasn’t going to get an answer, supplied one himself: “You don’t trust people’s joy,” he said. “You’re on the offensive 24/7. Jesus, Raf. How exhausting is that?” 

His steps were hurried, but Carisi’s were long. Barba never put enough distance between them to obscure anything worth hiding: his embarrassment, his shame. 

“Very, as are your impassioned pronouncements on the matter.” 

In Carisi’s heart, he saw Barba’s defensiveness and wanted to soothe it. He _ached,_ knowing Barba felt so much anxiety that it was finally starting to spill out from under the tight lid he kept on his whole self. He was buttoned up and pristine in all that he did; coming apart wasn’t his style. That undoing caused a visceral, physical reaction. 

The investigator in him told Carisi he was getting that much closer.

He baited a line and cast it out.

“If you’re this uncomfortable, we don’t have to go in. We don’t have to do anything, or be anything, for anybody.” 

He could sympathize with Barba’s discomfort; Carisi still managed his own among other cops. But where Carisi had come to accept he did himself no good sussing out people’s worst beliefs when no intentions rose to meet them, in Barba’s mind, the two were inseparable. Maybe a year ago, before intentions put a gun to his head and forced him to spell out a death wish through a hand that have it so willingly, things could have been different.

Barba liked to believe he could believe that, anyway.

“Not if it’s going to make you miserable,” Carisi concluded. 

Barba’s response was yet another last-ditch dismissal of the matter as a whole. 

“If I was so concerned about not encountering what makes me miserable,” he said, “I’d never get out of bed in the morning.”

It said too much. Even in jest, the sentiment peeled open flayed skin and revealed a slick, fleshy wound. The cold air gave it unnatural access to a deep chill, and Barba worked quickly to bandage it up. 

He gestured to the sorry expression of concern on Carisi’s face, like it was for his benefit, like it healed him. 

“You’re sweet.”

It was the wrong thing to say, the wrong expression to bastardize yet again. Carisi better liked it in bed, or whispered over the day’s third cup of coffee, brought thoughtfully to Barba’s office at exactly a quarter to noon whenever Carisi found he had the time. Here--and so often in recent months--it was a dismissal, and if not a lie, surely the kindly start to one. 

His hand shot out and caught Barba’s at the wrist. Carisi didn’t squeeze or tug, but the inclination was there. 

“I know why you say that,” Carisi said. “You think I don’t mean whatever it is I’m saying.” 

Barba peeled Carisi’s hand off of him and didn’t say a word.

“You want to sit, talk about it? Come on--”

“Don't you _dare_ sit on _these_ steps in _that_ coat.”

Carisi sucked in air through his nose, released it. Disappointment filled the stairwell like a noxious gas, and Barba felt as though he’d succumbed to it long ago. His lungs no longer felt the distinct kiss and burn; those pleasures were only for Carisi, now. Barba tasted them every on every breath. 

“I will admit--I got a little in over my head, there. Hearing things that weren’t--that Dr. Huang didn’t say to me. That no one’s said to me.” 

Barba spoke his peace in careful, precisely-chosen tones. He fashioned himself the picture of calm, though inside his heart was racing and he felt a profound and ready sickness pooling in his belly. Pooling and rising, and threatening to surge forth and spill from his lips, the same consistency as words, but with none of the frames he fit them into. 

He chewed through these anxieties until he ground out a sensible word of explanation. 

“It never catches me off guard. I’ll never have a beer spilled in my lap because I didn’t notice someone glaring daggers at me from across a room.” Barba watched that one land, and hurt as Carisi hurt, because while Barba never lacked for evidence of his own petty nature, it wasn’t often that he cared who his words stung. 

“On the flipside, I suppose I can’t take a compliment.”

“It’s more than that,” Carisi insisted. 

“Only sometimes,” Barba said, and, “Next compliment I get, I promise you: I’ll agree wholeheartedly and demand another.”

Deep in thought, Carisi shook his head. “But you told me--”

Barba snapped. 

He was right there with Carisi, recounting every warning leveled, every doubt planted, every excuse and denial that for _months_ Barba had made to keep Carisi’s expectations low, to cushion him from the emotional blowback that Barba not only envisioned, but _promised._ All that, only to discover Carisi did not cow to the same concerns Barba did. That those concerns weren’t as absolute as Barba claimed. 

“I _know_ what I told you. I treated you like an idiot and a child. You don't think that's how I feel, when I do this?”

_When I fuck up and forget why I’m here?_

“I told you once I was no mentor. I meant that in all things.”

Barba turned and took to the next couple of stairs. His footsteps echoed sharply and made their own imagined company, but were not otherwise joined. 

“Wait--” Carisi started up again, and stalled a ways behind Barba. He stood pitched slightly forward, hands planted on his hips, as though he couldn’t move for thinking in the effort’s stead. 

Barba turned, waited, and made a show of his impatience. It coarsed like rapids over his bones, under his skin. They stood opposed, Barba on higher ground on a stairwell platform, Carisi slumming it on the steps. 

“I know you’re making an effort to meet me on my level. I love that about you.” Carisi’s quiet mediation touched Barba unexpectedly. He looked up the stairwell, hopeful they would not be interrupted. 

“But, dude--don’t. Like, _don’t.”_

Barba couldn’t help but smile; Carisi only had a way with words for so long. He made his share of inevitable left turns.

“You make a convincing argument,” Barba joked. Even to his own ears, he sounded tired. His efforts to mask what he thought and how he thought it were taking their toll. It was like carrying water downhill; Barba finished the task wet, his arms aching, and with very little to show for himself.

He sighed. 

He knew Carisi would accept whatever he was given--ugly or not--so long as it held true. 

“It’s not that your way is intrinsically better--I’ve always said that, and I mean it. But--mine is… outdated.” 

Laying low, Barba knew, was tantamount to all it was perceived as: hiding. At least Carisi was of a mind to dictate the narrative, to stand before it a shining, glowing example of his own happiness. Barba knew he would not be any less happy in Carisi’s company if people knew as much. 

“And, perhaps I’m not taking these hurdles so gracefully,” Barba said, his tone rallying at the prospect of being short with someone--even if it was just himself. “But we’re still getting somewhere. Right?”

Carisi swelled with pride at only a hint as to where they’d come from, how far they’d gone. Bars and parties and baseball games were the least of it. They’d gone to bed and awoken in sunlight, then lost it again under mountains of words, crushing together and growing higher as new depths were plunged. 

(Carisi couldn’t eat crab. He wasn’t allergic, they just made him unbearably sad. Barba learned this only six weeks ago, and still it held to his heart like those first words of scripture. _In the beginning..._ )

“Yeah,” Carisi agreed. “But that doesn't meant we can’t go slower, anyway. Don’t expect yourself to conquer death threats and homophobia in the same calendar year.” 

Barba narrowed his eyes and squared his shoulders, looking for all the world as though he’d heard a genuine challenge.

“Who says I can’t?” 

“No one. I said you don’t have to.” 

Barba hummed and deliberated. He wasn't sure how much of his sorry little self Carisi should be made privy to in a single day, before it started to make an impression.

“Things went… objectively well with the DA, that whole crowd. I thought surely we had something else coming.”

It sounded so pitiful, so meek, that Carisi immediately believed it for the whole truth. Why would Barba lie and cast his own self as the undeniable fool? 

Carisi took slow, heaving steps to join Barba on the fourth floor landing. Barba rolled his eyes at the display, but didn’t rebuff Carisi when the man stood sure against him, slightly to one side on account of the cramped space, but shoulder and middle and _leg_ all generously given.

Carisi raised his hands to fix Barba’s shirt collar.

“So, three blocks? That’s your faith in your fellow man, spent?”

Barba warmed under the attention, the elegant fingers and familiar touch. 

“I’m practically giving it away.” 

Then, and only after raking up his voice to sound thin and annoyed--all the better for fooling Carisi into thinking he didn't mean it--Barba said, “I’m sorry.”

Carisi smiled for him--a genuine effort. 

He said, “You’re sweet.”

-

On the fourth floor of a rent-controlled apartment building in midtown, friends and family gathered not to celebrate the holiday, but to relish in the time it afforded them to spend in one another’s company, drawn together by food and drink and love spanning across decades like a skipping stone. Sometimes it touched down, or else people missed one another, but only grew as far apart as the next iteration of familiarity allowed. 

By some miracle, they’d all found one another here, and now. 

Carisi knocked gamely on the door to his Lieutenant’s apartment, and was swiftly drawn in, words of welcome-- _Look who finally decided to show up!_ \--extending like limbs to collect him, to envelope him into a familiar crowd themselves displaced into a kinder atmosphere. 

He saw these people almost every day of his life, but stepping into the precinct altered everyone’s perception of one another. There, they each took on the weight of responsibility their positions held.

Here, they were family.

Together, they were home.

Barba followed a step after; they’d exited his world and entered Carisi’s. It was only right that Carisi front the welcome, and indeed, it was a far warmer thing than even the best of Barba’s introductions. Benson had a beautiful smile for him, Fin took his eyes off his grandchild to nod at Carisi, and Rollins produced a bemused little smirk as she clocked Carisi’s borrowed outerwear. 

“You missed Melinda and George,” Benson said while taking their coats. Neither Barba nor Carisi corrected her. 

“And Tucker,” Rollins shared from her seat on the couch: curled, her legs tucked under herself, with Jesse resting and drooling over her shoulder.

Barba met Benson with a curious look. “Tucker?”

“Briefly,” Benson said, and if she had other thoughts than that they weren’t readily available on her pretty face or in her easy movements. She was wearing a burgundy dress, and Barba could forgive the on-the-nose color for how spectacular she made it look. 

“John had to take off, too,” Fin offered. “Older ‘n dirt, that guy. Picking up Marco winded him. Told his boney ass to rest up for the 25th.” 

Fin was sat in a plush loveseat, his grandson curled and asleep in his arms. The newly promoted Sergeant did not make an effort--or else, it was simply not in his nature--to soften his voice, though to his credit, the tiny child seemed to take comfort in being at the heart of that rumble.

“Christmas at our place,” Ken said, answering the lingering question there. “Munch is his date. It’s very sweet.”

“Goin’ on twenty years we spend Christmas together, seein’ a movie, eatin’ Chinese food. Longest relationship of my life, ‘course he’s coming to see my grandkid go crazy on Christmas morning.” 

“Maybe that’ll be me an’ Rollins someday,” Carisi teased. His first greeting--aside from Benson--went to Jesse. 

“Uh, three’s a crowd,” Rollins said, and threw a pointed look Barba’s way. Making himself at home, he’d gone to the kitchen to fix himself a drink. “Glad you could join us, Counselor.”

“I just came to check on my scotch. Don’t let him tell you any different.”

Carisi--who might have had a smart remark for Barba in return--said nothing. He’d moved on to meeting Marco, Ken and Alejandro’s son.

 _“Wow,”_ he said, and suddenly the breath had been driven from his lungs, like cattle from the plains, and he saw the whole of himself laid bare for miles and miles, through and over the horizon. 

“Yeah,” Fin agreed proudly, and laid a hand to rest on the child, so small that Fin’s touch encompassed the whole of him.

“Congratulations,” Carisi said to the married couple, once he’d remembered himself. 

Barba returned from the kitchen with a beer for Carisi and a glass of scotch for himself. Rollins watched the hand-off like it was an Olympic relay, and when she made room on the couch for both men, she held a secret smile for Barba alone. Barba didn’t meet it for longer than a second; he threw his gaze across the room, certain if he was pinned down again under the weight of someone else’s innocent positivity, he’d misbehave.

Barba sought introductions from Ken and Alejandro, though he knew the two by description. He recognized in their faces a look--they didn’t know him, but held more awareness than he’d given with merely his name and title. 

Again, Barba remembered the words he took from Huang, the sentiment he held only briefly in his hands before leaving it misshapen and ugly. No, Barba realized, they didn’t know that much about him. They knew only the nervousness he masked with confidence, and by no subtle application, there. He wore it like a face of makeup, daring and bright. He was taking this look for a night on the town.

With its latest additions, the scene settled into what it had been all night: an easy gathering of friends and colleagues, extended family, bound by horrors and strength enough to see through them.

Barba watched Carisi take in the room, his face lighting up at the tiny Christmas tree Benson had, and the litany of gifts set underneath, some of them clumsily wrapped by a child’s hand. The food he’d prepared and brought over early that morning was on everyone’s plates, being enjoyed. Rollins unloaded Jesse only Carisi immediately, happy to have another set of free and willing hands. 

Barba held his in his lap, glass of scotch settled nicely between them.

A whispered _hey_ from his left turned his gaze, and Barba was met with Benson’s warm, graceful smile.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, or didn’t say, because Barba was certain the sentiment sooner echoed out of his chest than it was availed to the room at large. 

“Fin says you were thinking about law school,” Carisi said to Ken, his smile still wide and only for Marco. He managed to wrench it away to look at Ken, who seemed embarrassed to be put on the spot.

“This, after studying computer science at Hudson?” Benson asked, curious. 

Ken launched into his ready line--ready, because Fin often posed this very question--saying that he found social work more rewarding than his post-university tech startup gig, a lucrative endeavor that lasted all of nine months. 

Alejandro chimed in, “He still complains about what the beanbag chairs did to his back.” 

While rearranging a squirming Jesse on his lap, Carisi delved into his own well-prepared statements for Fordham, lauding the experience as one that helped him in his current profession. 

Ken listened intently, and found much the same reasoning he’d arrived at, himself. 

“So you’re not pursuing law as a career, then?”

Carisi blinked in surprise, though the question was nothing if not the natural conclusion to draw from his statements. 

“I feel like this question was planted,” he said, and earned a few chuckles around the room. 

“I don’t know yet,” he admitted, and glanced sidelong at Barba, who looked more curious than expectant, which was a welcome change in Carisi’s eyes. His gaze shifted rightly to Ken. “It’s like you said--it takes a couple shots to get to a place you feel you’re doing the most good.” 

Nevermind that after stints in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens before settling on Manhattan SVU, Carisi had just about emptied the metaphorical chamber.

Carisi took the opportunity to stretch his legs and refill some drinks. He was always quick to offer hosting duties, a polite gesture now that began as a transparent ploy to ensure continued invitations to squad get-togethers. Food was his real strength, however, as Carisi made clear by returning with bowls of honey-roasted hazelnuts dusted in a mix of spices, and cooked until the flavors were right, the crunch held, and the treat melted like butter. 

Barba took the first handful; it was obvious he’d very much enjoyed Carisi’s practice batch. 

( _“Is it practice?”_ Barba had asked a week ago, tossing back handfuls of the sweetened treat and talking through a mouthful, “If they’re perfect?”

“If they’re so good, I’ll take those to Liv’s. Stop depleting my supply.” 

“...They’re maybe a little overbaked.”)

Talk turned to plans for that ever-distant prospect of time off--even just a weekend or two in succession. A glimpse of normalcy. Rollins mentioned her intention of taking Jesse to visit her mother in Georgia. 

“Thankfully, I’ve got cause to put it off a couple years. Like _I’m_ going to be that asshole on a flight with an infant.”

“You were that asshole in a movie theatre,” Carisi teased, and rightfully earned himself a shove from Rollins that knocked him well into Barba. She gave every excuse and all at once, clearly still embarrassed.

It was _one time_ and _Star Wars_ had been in theatres for months already, and it was _Carisi_ who had wanted to go.

Barba frowned at that. 

“Are you serious? You saw it again?” 

“Did I swindle you out of a date, Counselor?” Rollins asked, and sipped her wine as if _it_ was the thing that made her daring and wild, and not natural instinct alone. 

“I already had to go twice,” Barba muttered. He took no issue with Rollins’ choice of word--much less the gall to use it--but rather, Carisi’s apparent scheming. “It was _imperative_ that I go twice.” 

“And Noah makes four,” Benson added. An afternoon off was a rarity, so she remembered the day in exacting detail. And of course, there were makeshift lightsaber battles between her and Noah for weeks after the fact. 

Fin raised a hand, upped the bid. “Five.”

“You have a sickness,” Barba stated as Carisi playfully berated the room of turncoats. 

Ease ushered in and filled new and spirited bouts of conversation. Amidst it all, Barba and Carisi shared a brief interlude, signaled by a fleeting glance and a casual touch in the reach and settling of a hand, in which there was real staying power. Barba led the way and Carisi met his gesture with a mirthful little smile--delight, despite the knock to his favorite franchise.

It was not an unspoken word of thanks, this smile. Carisi thought they were past that. It was just shared time, now, and an acknowledgement, as simple as it was profound: _here we are._

The declaration was nothing so grand or enlightening, only as reaffirming as that hand on Carisi’s shoulder, the brush of thigh against thigh, the plates of food that quickly lost their respective ownership. The _details._

Barba had to remind himself he knew as much before. Love had taken him to uncertain places, informed him of new and novel details. He’d lived for those details: snaking arms in darkened theatres, a nose busied in an ear as eyes scanned letters on a page, scribbled or printed with the weight of a legal system behind it. Weight behind him, hot with intent. 

But he’d been young then, of course. Young and exceedingly willful.

It wasn’t that Carisi didn’t merit the effort or the risk, but there was so much more to lose, now. Barba wouldn’t have guessed it in his youth, but hopes for a bright future were nothing compared to the fear of losing even a dreary present. Maybe he was cowardly in that respect, or had simply gone cold to it all in recent years. There was something about Carisi’s enthusiastic approach to love that made Barba feel young and worthy of it, but then there was everything else, every stiff joint in the morning and a mind for only work and responsibilities that made every moment of sheer delight--every _Star Wars_ screening--an argument to be had.

Barba pushed those thoughts aside. That he’d felt bright and ease among friends and in the company of his lover was enough. _This is the point,_ Barba realized. Of everything. He was known in full by these people. There was no hiding, now. 

He understood this sat among them, celebrating with food and drink and laughter, just as he’d understood it months ago, where they gathered outside his apartment, watching him sink words into paper at the instruction of his would-be assassins. He understood he’d been waiting for them as he chose to stall, stall, _stall,_ not for a miracle, but for the people he trusted most to be at their best.

He was liberated. 

-

Benson’s apartment wasn’t so small that one couldn’t find a moment for privacy, if they were looking.

Carisi found his in the hallway just outside the bathroom, from which Ken emerged with a freshly-changed Marco and immediately made an apologetic face for the smell. 

Carisi waved off his concerns. Again, he was captivated by the tiny person, all blinking brown eyes and a lip-smacking mouth. 

“So you guys adopted? How was that whole--process?” 

“Long,” Ken answered at once. “Ugly. Expensive. Demoralizing.” His tired eyes brightened, then, just as they had when the wait was over, the complications dealt with, a child in his arms. “But worth it. Completely. I just saw so many kids in my line of work who… well, you know. Who didn’t ever have a chance. And Jasmine--Marco’s biological mother--she’s… she has some problems. She’s trying, always trying, but it’s hard.” 

Carisi nodded; even without the details, he could imagine. Since working SVU, he _couldn’t stop_ imagining. This was one little boy they wouldn't see again in the world colored by that dim and grey light. Potential abuse, neglect--Marco was spared.

“Barba doesn’t want kids.” 

Ken sported a lopsided smile, thinking Carisi was making a joke.

“No shit,” he laughed. The ADA had been the only one to make himself scarce at the opportunity to hold Marco. In such a small space, he couldn’t exactly be subtle. Carisi’s expression fell, and Ken saw his error. 

“Oh,” he said, and winced. “Either way, it’s a tough decision.”

“Yeah,” Carisi answered easily. Ken clapped him on the arm, and complimented the meat croquettes, stuffed zucchini, and endless platters of Italian wedding cookies--all Carisi’s doing, he’d been told after marveling to Fin that Benson had gotten her tiny get-together _catered._

Carisi had no reservations about talking shop when it came to family recipes, so the moment tied itself up and to completion. 

But as he spoke, he wondered whether Ken had meant _either way_ as kids or not. It clicked for Carisi that Ken meant _a family or a lover._

The seeming insanity that spurred Barba’s earlier haranguing of Dr. Huang became readily apparent in Carisi’s own self. The fact that he’d replied so breezily--and not meant that either, even, but all the same--was suddenly in the forefront of his mind, ballooning in size even as he tried to stuff it back, away, and give himself a moment to reflect. The effort was useless, and Carisi could scarcely concentrate on anything else. 

It was terrible, he realized, the way a misunderstanding colored the heart, drawing it in sickening grays, then pinching it blue. 

When he returned to the couch, he found Barba’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze, letting go before Barba so much as looked his way. 

-

Just after ten thirty, Benson opened the apartment door to Deputy Chief Dodds, at which point Barba subtly removed the arm he had drawn loose across the back of the couch and Carisi’s shoulders, besides. An uncertain silence fell over the space; Ken and Alejandro did not know this man, and everyone else knew him in a capacity that stood well outside a Christmas party. But Benson invited the Chief Deputy in all the same, took his coat, and welcomed him kindly. 

Theirs was a strange breed of friendship--fraught at times, but stronger for every moment of uncertainty. Barba was sure Benson's welcome was sincere, and had she been alone Dodds would have enjoyed himself in her company. But as he stripped himself of his heavy coat (and, really, Barba enjoyed that. Weather was the great equalizer, and even powerful men took a hit.) he saw a litany of faces and their smaller, softer iterations in the pudgy existences of _babies,_ no less. 

Barba sympathized. 

He stood from the couch and offered to get Dodds a drink. The man--grateful not to be passed around for introductions amidst an unexpectedly small crowd--followed Barba to the kitchen. 

“Word is you can appreciate a good scotch,” Barba said, trying for bright. In truth, he had no idea. Word _wasn’t_ that Dodds had a drinking problem, but talk was sparse when it came to such a respected and stalwart individual.

(Or else Barba wasn’t the watercooler aficionado he claimed to be.)

Dodds said nothing, so Barba tried again. With a nod towards their respective places outside the squad, Barba spared a word to being the odd ones out. 

“Are you?” Dodds asked, his tone just shy of accusatory. “You seemed cozy enough in there.”

Barba’s hand stilled about the neck of the scotch he’d sent along with Carisi’s haul of delicacies. (He’d joined it with a bottle of wine, too, because no one but him ever drank the scotch.) 

“I suppose I can’t give a blanket recommendation of my methods,” he said, and went about fixing the man a glass. One for himself, too, because Barba wasn’t about to go back into the living room, that comment burning in his ears, without a little something for his trouble. 

Barba drank right along with Dodds; he’d force camaraderie if he had to. 

“Goddamn,” Dodds said, coming off his first sip. “That is good.”

“My gift to you,” Barba said easily, and raised the bottle. It wasn’t as though this crowd was clamoring for a taste, and besides--Barba knew it was a far greater hostess gift to make the Chief Deputy happy. 

 

“No, no,” Dodds dismissed, but upended his glass so as to produce it anew, empty and gleaming. “But I’ll take another.” 

Barba poured a generous double. 

“This isn’t the first stop on your night’s itinerary, I take it?” 

He hoped he hadn’t miscalculated and called the Chief Deputy a lush. 

“Fifth,” Dodds said, putting Barba’s fears to rest. He looked tired for each and every one of them. “And last. I was in the area. I try and make it a point to show up for my Lieutenants and the invitation was there…” He gave a rueful little shake of his head and added, “I didn’t realize it was just,” he stopped, gestured. 

_Family._

Barba heard the sentiment as surely as though Dodds had said it, gave the Latin word origins, and used it in a sentence. 

“I’m content to stand around drinking in this kitchen for as long as it suits you,” Barba said, and found he didn’t have to delve deep to find a goodly helping of genuine desire towards that very end. “Trust me, it’s no hardship.”

Perhaps, in the end, he oversold it. 

Dodds scoffed--a huff of breath that was all scotch, and some far-back reaches of egg-nog from earlier in his night. 

“Your affection for these people spilleth over, Counselor,” Dodds said. He didn’t mince words. “And that’s not even touching the obvious.” 

“True,” Barba returned, cooler than he felt. “If I only cared that we worked hard for one another, I’d be out the door.” Now that he was removed from it, Barba considered the scene. His friends and their little families came together and fit nicely as mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Then there was the idyllic showing of the detectives themselves, brothers and sisters in arms. 

And yet there was a space held, Barba thought, for him.

“They’re good people.” 

“My son thought so.”

“He thought very highly of you, too.”

Dodds only nodded absently; acknowledgement he’d been extended a kindness. 

“I may take you up on your offer,” he said.

“Do,” Barba encouraged coolly. He passed Dodds the bottle as if he expected the man to appraise its weight when, really, it was part of a binding contract. “But stay a while.” 

It was Barba’s deft touch that corralled Dodds back into the living room, where those assembled took their cues from Barba, who looked calm and sure. He all but mouthed, _Relax._

Fin was first to stand and shake hands with the Chief Deputy, who commented on Fin’s advancement in ranks. Fin introduced his family, and Noah--who had spent much of the evening hovering about baby Marco--mirrored the men’s behavior and likewise struck out a hand for Dodds to shake. Across the room, Benson glowed with pride.

Whereas Marco was sound asleep, Jesse remained wide-eyed and wriggling, curious after all the people. Dodds bent at the knee and seemed to marvel right back. 

“She’s perfect,” Dodds decreed, and met Rollins with something of a wry smile. “I seem to recall you giving me hell about desk duty.” 

Then, to Carisi, Dodds joked, “Where’s yours?” 

Carisi’s apparent mortification was tempered only by Barba’s bawdy snort of laughter. The man who had returned swiftly to his side with scotch on his breath was quick to take the joke and answer it with the coolness needed to soothe Carisi’s burning cheeks. 

Barba waved a hand about the room, indicating the various method and means of procreation. 

“Please do not encourage this behavior.” 

Barba wouldn’t have guessed in a lifetime that Chief Deputy Dodds should be the one to break the ice and set himself and Carisi on clear and open waters, but he couldn’t rightfully claim the man hadn’t done exactly that. The quiet affirmation he’d given would strike Carisi later, some time after the warmth in his cheeks faded and he saw the joke for a joke, and nothing more. 

It felt like a favor, though Carisi would surely contest that. And though odds were they were even--the scotch in the man’s hand matched what was in Barba’s, and that was no accident--Barba wanted to return it. 

Benson beat him to it. Another favor, though as far as those went between the two, Barba had long lost count. Her endless compassion often gave her a head start to Barba’s strategic planning. 

So he left her to it, and settled in comfortably by Carisi, even crossing a leg and digging that much further into the other man’s space. He allowed himself to feel undaunted by any imagined imposition he made, being the one to sit that close, to answer for Carisi, to be cool and collected on his behalf.

Driven by a finely-tuned sense of empathy, Benson saw the distant goal Dodds had set for himself: he wanted to be near those nearest his son. It had taken him a long time to realize that he could--and should--do that. Benson all but took him by the hand and stationed him there, plying him with a plate of hors d'oeuvres and the opportunity to merely sit and observe, if he wished, or engage when the desire struck him. 

When he spoke, it was to give an emphatic word to the squad’s hard work and dedication. The sentiments--though perhaps better suited to the office--were nonetheless appreciated. Dodds fell silent after that, confining himself to a muted existence. Perhaps it was the season, or the fact that he’d stopped receiving calls from Mike’s fiancee, but Dodds was hungry for some semblance of his family. He felt starved for their memories, for those moments outside himself that he could not catalogue as perfectly as those he’d experienced for himself. 

In recent weeks he’d become consumed with the question: Did Mike take his coffee with cream and sugar? Dodds only ever took milk, and in his company Mike followed suit. But Dodds had his suspicions. 

It was a fruitless endeavor, but--

He hoped one day, someone might let it slip.

This helped. Seeing Mike’s friends and imagining him there along with them soothed that part of Dodds that, while having accepted the loss of his son, still wondered after the possibilities. 

Carisi understood this. It registered with him as though Dodds had announced his intentions aloud, and opened the floor to suggestions. Ever eager, Carisi availed himself to the cause. 

It was by his very nature--talkative, outgoing, eager-to-please--that he should have known Mike well. Though, in retrospect, Mike knew very little about Carisi. With some cajoling, Carisi refreshed his beer and managed to switch places with Barba, seating himself to Dodds’ right. Carisi’s chatter came naturally, and when he spoke about Mike, he all but rendered the man physically present in the room. 

Carisi took care to hold the conversation as though he had Dodds in a private audience. His hand gestures were loud, but his voice soft as a murmur. Given his proximity--and, admittedly, his curiosity--Barba eavesdropped, and was quietly charmed by Carisi’s efforts. 

There was that compassion again, racing ahead and leaving Barba in the dust.

There was not a touch of scheming in him, as was the case for Barba’s interaction with Dodds--the scotch in his hand, included. Of course, Barba recognized when Dodds had had enough--when his heart became too full, and aching now, bleeding through his tight smile. Barba returned his heavy hand to Carisi’s shoulder, and willed him to stop. Now that the hand was back, however, it did not remove itself for the rest of the evening. In fact, Barba extended his hold, stretching his arm to cover all that was his, and to drag his thumb absently along the fabric of Carisi’s shirtsleeve.

Talk turned soft in reverence for the year spread out behind them. A year without Mike. A year in which Barba was narrowly spared much the same fate. 

Dodds spoke privately with Benson for a time, again wished those gathered a happy holiday, and took his leave. He left Barba’s scotch on the table, having gotten what he’d came for, already.

Ken and Alejandro made noises after the hour, and similarly thanked Benson for hosting them. Fin took up Marco’s car seat and offered to walk them out. While Alejandro jogged ahead to collect their car and bring it closer to Benson’s building, Ken and Fin kept warm in the small entryway, with Ken holding his sleeping child securely in his arms.

“I forgot they were a thing,” Ken said. He did not feel the need to clarify as to who he was speaking about.

Fin shrugged. “I think that’s how they like it.” 

“No, like I literally forgot.” Fin had only mentioned it, after all, offhandedly during a co-op _Halo_ campaign. “You could have said something.” 

“You want a daily update?” Fin said, but watching his son roll his eyes and sway back and forth for the child in his arms, he was heartened by the interest. Ken hadn’t had Fin to see himself in, growing up, and Fin privately held doubts that his son would have found shades of himself there, even if his father had been in his life. 

It only made sense that Ken still searched the world for people like himself. 

“They don’t play it out at work, but Carisi seems happy.” 

Fin didn’t add that Barba _always_ looked pleased with himself, so there was little change to account for on his end. But maybe there were instances of indelible softness that took him, braced him by the shoulders, gave him pause, and afforded the rest of the world a moment to breathe. 

Fin didn’t think he was wrong, figuring they had Carisi to thank for that.

“What do you want to know?”

“When did it start?”

Fin considered his answer carefully. He did this in part because he knew he was afforded the time; Alejandro was a good kid. He always took care to give Ken and his father a few extra moments in private. All Alejandro lacked was a lick of subtlety about it.

“You read about Barba in the papers, right? Dude was getting death threats…” Fin’s tone said the rest: the threats materialized, and very nearly came to fruition. 

“Right. There was a trial.” Ken frowned. “So, after the trial?” Fin said nothing, and Ken understood him at once.

“Before.”

“That’d be my guess.”

“How very Whitney Houston of them,” Ken said, a sly smile playing over his features. He clarified, _“The Bodyguard.”_

“Man, I know my Whitney Houston,” Fin scoffed. “I’m just glad you said it. I’m still the guy’s superior.”

Ken looked down at Marco, and planted an impromptu kiss on the boy’s tiny head of curls. “So he’s never talked to you about it?” 

“I think he’s got Liv and Amanda for that.”

“You think.”

There was tone enough there that Fin took his meaning. He answered it with a beleaguered sigh. 

“I’ll say something,” Fin promised. “Open the door a crack.”

The car pulled slowly up--Alejandro was barely clocking miles, bless him--and Ken found it in himself to look pleased. 

“Thank you,” he returned smartly. And Fin didn’t mind the attitude; no, he relished it. He’d so often only seen his son harried and wary, or indignant and sure. Fin had never put a hand on the kid, yet for years after reconnecting, Ken prefaced every announcement with squared shoulders and a set jaw. Like he expected a punch, and meant to take it. 

_Yeah, I’m gay._

_I’m engaged._

_We’re adopting._

He’d laid every word bare, and leaned forward just enough to taunt and posture for what it was he half-expected to meet: the back of a loved-one’s hand. _Someone_ had done this to him in the past--loved ones, friends, society at large. Willful and fatalistic determination was his only son’s go-to measure when revealing something of himself. 

His son was tough, but at the expense of an open heart. Fin knew that would _always_ be his fault.

As they waited, Fin wondered if Ken didn’t want him to talk to Carisi, but to _Barba._

Whatever he wanted, Fin knew he’d already submitted himself to the task. There’d been no argument made, only the simple trick of repeating Fin’s own words back at him. It was uncomplicated and rudimentary by definition, but elegant in its execution. Fin clapped his son on the shoulder and hoisted the intricate car seat up as he prepared to meet Alejandro at the car.

“Kid, you’re gonna kill it in law school.” 

-

Like all the best parties--and Benson had thrown a few--this one ended slowly, seemingly in shifts. The company had gone, and only those small swathes of family remained. While Benson helped a drowsey Noah brush his teeth and dress for bed, Rollins lingered. With Jesse finally asleep, Rollins’ thoughts turned to the night as she’d seen it, over the top of her child’s head and sidelong towards Carisi and Barba.

And Barba’s hand on Carisi’s shoulder or knee, sometimes tapping, sometimes still, but ever-present. 

“I guess I’m just not seeing it,” Rollins said, unprompted. Benson, who was managing Noah’s impressive bicycling kicking as she changed him into his pyjamas, held her tongue. “Don’t get me wrong--I get what’s there to see. Barba is… a lot. It’s just not what I pictured Carisi would be into, you know?”

Rollins’ view was colored by the times she’d butted heads with Barba. They were both passionate people, so it happened more often than not. Rollins simply hadn’t had the opportunity to see the care Barba invested into his work heaped on a lover. Truthfully, neither had Benson, but she’d heard the man’s voice soften to speak of it, and believed nothing less than his fullest effort in that respect. 

“I don’t see him as much,” Rollins offered, again without inquiry. “He’ll still come around sometimes--hang out, watch TV, cook, babysit Jesse. But he’d rather be with Barba. He’s always wanted that.” 

She shook her head, hearing herself.

“I’m glad he got what he wanted,” she insisted. “That concept just seems impossible to me.” 

Benson gave an encouraging smile, happy Rollins had seen herself around to Carisi’s side of things. 

“They still have concerns about… perception,” Benson said, trying for diplomatic. She knew this kind of sidelined talk was precisely what so unnerved Barba, and even if he never heard a word about it, she’d still feel guilty for intervening. 

But Carisi, she decided. He’d appreciate it.

“I think… there’s a lot of happiness between them they haven’t figured out how to share.” 

_And understanding,_ she thought, but decided to spare Barba that much. 

Rollins narrowed her gaze into something thoughtful and suspect. “Barba must have said something to you,” she determined, “Because you’re not _that_ particular brand of sunny optimist.” 

“Carisi hasn’t said anything to you?” Benson countered, and here, Rollins had to acknowledge her fault.

Carisi had. 

Only, she’d continued to doubt him. 

She thought about those moments--and there were many in the past few hours alone--that she’d caught Barba looking deep in thought, focused not on the various conversations, but a empty spot of wall or a smudge on the coffee table. Then Carisi would laugh, and Barba would brighten on command. Or Carisi would hand off Jesse or Noah or whatever infant had found its way into his lap, and Barba would reclaim a knee with his hand, or inch back into the space hed surrendered for potential spit-up. The gesture held none of the focus of those solitary moments Barba took for himself. 

No, it was something baser. 

Like an unmanned mission to Mars, Barba simply put faith in his capabilities-- _he knew this man, knew his heart_ \--and let the effort soar.

-

Finding themselves alone in the living room, Barba and Carisi began tidying up. It was an effort Carisi started that Barba only resigned himself to after watching his fill of Carisi bending to collect crumpled napkins and wayward sippy cups. 

They brushed arms and threw elbows gently into sides as they crossed paths. Barba tackled dishes while Carisi collected empties, swept up crumbs, and adjusted misplaced throw pillows as he circled the room. 

His limbs felt tired but warmed-through by a generous evening shared among friends and colleagues. It was some relief, now, to stand solely in one another’s company. 

From the kitchen, Barba caught Carisi smiling. It was the same look that brought light to his eyes and teased the corners of his mouth when he shared a lunch date with Bella and Beatrice, or the look that found him along with the glow of his phone as his family embarked on another wild group text. For Carisi, this night had been its own family affair, and a blessing, besides. 

Seeing that, Barba knew he had no choice but to suffer Carisi’s absence on behalf of five of said blessings.

“You should spend Christmas with your family,” Barba said, looking into the sudsy sink water as he withdrew another plate.

Carisi’s head popped up from behind the couch. He frowned at the suggestion, but didn’t reply until he’d made his way into the kitchen and stood himself next to Barba, leaning against the fridge and ducking his head until Barba made eye contact with him. 

“Hey, no, I already told them the score. Not after the way they treated you. Us.” 

“Please,” Barba dismissed, and handed Carisi a sopping wet glass to dry. “You forgive them already.”

“But you don’t. And they haven’t apologized, so. That’s it. That’s done.” Carisi shrugged with a breeziness that belied the very weight of his words, then handed him the glass back. “You missed a spot.” 

“Excuse me, no I didn’t.”

“Yeah, you did. Look there.”

“You’re blind.”

“Right… there…” 

It was then that Fin returned to the apartment, and Benson and Rollins from Noah’s bedroom, so that they all might converge to happen upon the quietly intimate moment that looked to be fashioned like a storefront window. It reflected desire and happiness back unto its viewer with a vision of Carisi, practically draped over Barba, chin resting on the man’s broad shoulder, and a hand sliding comfortably between the pristine white of the back of Barba’s shirt and the strained suspender strap that braced down his spine. And then there was Barba, the recipient of this young man’s attention--and embrace--having shed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, expending his markedly valuable time doing dishes.

Sensing they’d been spotted, Barba wiped the smile off his face and looked-- _because he was_ \--annoyed for the intrusion. But Carisi couldn’t be bothered. He slunk off of Barba like he’d had to be told twice, and the yearning on his face was never quite scrubbed clean.

Benson proposed a toast to double as a nightcap; she’d been hopeful they’d all stick around to share one. 

Carisi collected glasses (“Not that one,” Barba said. “It has a spot. _Apparently._ ”) and champagne was plentiful. 

When Benson spoke, her voice was warm but her gaze felt hard-set, as if packed well and thrown a great distance. 

“It’s been a chaotic year,” she began. “Good and bad. I’m glad we could all be together to celebrate seeing it through. I’m honored to have your families in my home, though I’d by lying if I didn’t say I consider them to be an extension of my own.” 

Barba felt Carisi’s hand settle on his back, fingers spreading wide to capture the most of him.

“I hope you feel the same,” she said, and her brilliant smile was well met. “And I hope you know that I am immensely proud of this family. It is my ardent belief that you all took on every battle--every case, every legal hurdle, every pitfall--with tremendous courage, strength of character, and grace.” 

They collectively raised their glasses and drank. Barba was quick with a rejoinder, and it earned the group another taste. 

Adding of Benson herself, Barba said, “To Liv, who led every charge.” 

-

“You’re either feast or famine, huh?” 

Carisi was still buttoning his coat when he and Barba left Benson’s apartment, and parted ways with both Rollins and Fin, who shared a cab. 

He was thinking of both the start of their evening as well as its end. Barba had sat so close to him in Benson’s apartment, long arm stretched pleasantly across his shoulders. A smile attached itself to the memory of the way that--after departing in search of an hors d'oeuvre or a drink--that heavy reach always found its way back. Those were countless delights stood in comparison with the single instance of overt touching at the DA’s party--a delicious morsel, but just the one. 

“We were among friends,” Barba pointed out. “The very crux of your argument for all _this._ ”

Carisi just smiled. 

He wasn’t complaining.

“Which did you prefer?” Barba asked, and Carisi was momentarily taken by the question.

“You’re asking me to choose between when I ate my own cooking, verse some spiraled cold cuts and cube cheese? The Lieu’s, hands down.”

Barba rolled his eyes; the point of fact about food was undeniable, and he shouldn’t have been surprised it would be Carisi’s first point of order. Everything else--company, atmosphere, tone--should rank below it. 

“I’m undecided.” 

“Warm champagne really do it for you?”

Barba shrugged--an empty gesture because he wasn’t, really. 

“Taking you out, showing you off. I may have developed a taste for it.” 

Carisi nodded in appreciation, but his gaze--his focus--was lost. It traveled down the sidewalk, up buildings, into the darkened sky. Carisi felt as though so long as he didn’t blink, he could see for lightyears. 

“This still blows my fucking mind.”

It was said, Barba noted, without any cringing realization towards the roundabout way the imagery there echoed Barba’s year-old ordeal. 

He was moving on, improving, just as Barba was. Still. 

“Don’t start,” Barba warned, but his tone was warm and inviting. If Carisi wanted to sing his praises, far be it from Barba to put the kibosh on the effort. Though, he was of a mind to tease it out, to make Carisi think twice before saying what it was he felt deeply enough to render down low into a whisper. 

“If you start all your adulating on the sidewalk, I might not be able to contain myself. You may very well have to arrest me for public indecency.”

“No. _Really.”_ Again, Carisi couldn’t help but gaze skyward. Barba was right by his side, but Carisi felt answerable to a God he hadn’t felt closer to in years. “You’re amazing. Even when you didn’t like what was happening, who was talking to you, what you needed to do, you were--so sure of yourself. And sure of me. I feel like I gotta thank you for that, you know? Because… I know you have your doubts about people. But you don’t have delusions about yourself. That--”

“Honestly, _stop._ You’re embarrassing yourself. It was an office party, not the Met Gala.”

Carisi said nothing else, but the way he looked at Barba held its own, and Barba felt every word as though Carisi had not only spoken them, but written them, finger to the soft of Barba’s palm, a hundred thousand times over. Barba felt compelled to object. 

He took two extra steps forward, then turned on his heel and threw out a leg, positioning himself in front of Carisi. There, the hand he’d laid on the man’s arm was mirrored by the other, and both dipped low until Barba had his arms wrapped about Carisi’s narrow waist. Carisi leaned into his touch, both surprised and giddy with the display.

“Please,” Barba insisted. “Stop. Or I’ll go to pieces.” 

Carisi gave him that bright look again--all dimples and crinkled blue eyes and delight. 

“Yeah, yeah.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> omg I'm so close to hitting 1 million words of fanfic on this godforsaken site, at which point I will promptly die of embarrassment. That's the prize. The sweet release of death.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, sorry again for the delay in getting this chapter up and finished. My only excuse is I didn’t want to do it. 
> 
> There’s also my two jobs, complete lack of days off, and the crushing reality of this garbage administration smothering every breath of joy that might startle in my throat. I’m so tired. Call your fucking Senators and Representatives, people. Every goddamn day.

Barba felt the whole of his life pull softly around him, all gauze woven in threads of linen and sunlight. He alone existed in the space between a dream and reality, and not just for waking up.

In reality, this was little more than bedsheets drawn across his body, and a crown of dirty blonde hair positioned such to take in the glow from outside his bedroom window. He’d been awake a long time, aware of every sigh and breath of his bedfellow. 

Closing his eyes did the strange work of giving clarity to how he felt. Viewing himself within a scene only ever made him question his own intentions, but this--his chosen exclusion--made him feel like director, star, and production assistant on a one-man show. 

And _Carisi_ \--Carisi was everything else. He was point A to point B, every motivation, the setting, the dialogue, rising and falling action. 

Craft services. 

Barba smiled, taken with his own silly imaginings. He’d like to see Carisi on the big screen--the man had the face for it, all blue eyes and bouffant hair. In less kind terms, Barba imagined a Hoover-esque G-Man routine, awash with kicked-in doors, twisted-arms, and wrongdoers brought to justice. 

“What are you thinking about?” Carisi asked, his voice heavy with sleep, but pulled out of that sunken place with curiosity for the small smile flitting over Barba’s resting features. Even in the pale light, Barba was a rich tapestry of colors: red in the face for a cold on its last legs, dark hair dusting down his chest, arms still touchably browned from the warmer weather, and his entire right side spilled into shadow. He was a Baroque painting, spayed like he was, smiling as he did, invested in such a drama of his own making. 

“Hoover.”

Carisi sat up. “Herbert or J. Edgar?” 

“J. Edgar.”

“Damn,” Carisi whispered, and sank back down into the dent he’d made at Barba’s side. 

Barba scoffed and rolled his eyes. “So you think of _one_ piece of caselaw precedent as I do--a _month ago,_ no less--and the thrill hasn’t cheapened for you? We do not share a psychic connection. You’re like somebody’s great aunt, the way you’re on about this.” 

Carisi thought Barba was downplaying their bout of synchronicity, which had been such a gas of a moment, Rollins--one among its witnesses--uttered a dry and resounding, _who owes who a soda?_

“Yeah, but, see--I _knew_ you’d say that--” 

Barba twisted around and gave Carisi a kiss that was all bristly facial hair and bared teeth. The fight Carisi put up was laughable, and soon they were set to laze around in bed, trading kisses and caresses until Barba took up with his phone--his other constant bedfellow--to check his e-mails while Carisi made like a cat, splaying out at any odd angle so long as his head found a center of warmth resting on Barba’s midsection. 

Barba didn’t know where the rest of Carisi got to, given where he’d laid his head. He imagined the younger man was half-hanging off the bed, so he moved to rest a little higher on a collection of pillows, ideally to bring Carisi’s feet up from where he expected they were nearly touching the floor. Barba drew up a leg--bare, save for the short hem of his boxers--and Carisi took to the new helping of flesh with interest. He ran a hand idly down the length of Barba’s thigh and occasionally lifted the elastic of Barba’s boxers, simply to look at the man’s dick, all the while holding a kind of sweet, considering look on his face. 

The hand Barba might have raised to meet Carisi’s where his interests held was stalled, however, with the ever-present shadow of his work, creeping in even now at such an early hour to cast necessity over leisure. 

He made the choice in all of a second, and abandoned the bed to shower and dress, leaving Carisi with only a sorry excuse. 

_Damage control,_ he said. 

The matter concerned misfiled documents pertaining to a deal he’d struck, placing the case in legal limbo. Retrieving and rerouting the files, though well outside his purview, would be the surest means towards a solution. It was only a question of who would oversee the correction, and given that Carmen was upstate, Barba saw the task fall to him.

(“I told you,” he’d said when Carisi made some noises towards his staying, even though Barba was already drawing on his suit jacket, “I wanted that asshole in prison by Christmas.”)

In all, the effort took nearly three hours, and even then, Barba had to phone Carmen to virtually walk him through the myriad of offices in the lower tiers of the courthouse, a space that was unnaturally dark even for all its garish fluorescent lighting. 

He took a cab home, stopping four blocks shy to pick up fresh bagels from a neighborhood deli--still bustling, of course, a day before Christmas. While the brisk walk stirred awake the part of him that had settled in the cab, the prospect of returning to bed could take him either way. 

Barba would gladly return to sleep or exert himself, so long as Carisi was party to the effort. 

Along with his coat and shoes, he abandoned his still-hot purchase--coat in the closet, shoes on the small rack by the door, and breakfast on the kitchen counter. He had a mind for returning to bed at once, stripping naked as he went, but _overeager_ wasn’t a good look for him. He couldn’t carry it well; he leaned towards the wrong side of giddy when it struck, and pursed lips weren’t his favorite.

(He supposed he could just relent, just _smile,_ as was his desire, but--no.)

He turned the corner into his bedroom. There, he saw Carisi sitting up in bed, on his knees, shoulders back but leaning forward with the rest of his body, coming to a very particular _point._

He had a hand snaked comfortably into his boxer-briefs, and was loosely playing with himself.

Carisi was all bedhead, mirthful smirking, and bright eyes. 

He was _sexy,_ and Barba was resoundly pleased that this was to be his morning. Privately, he hoped his breath didn’t smell overtly like the bagel he’d partaken in along his walk home. 

_All-dressed_ didn’t quite suit the tone Carisi was obviously going for. 

(If given an opening, Barba thought he’d drop that line, just to see Carisi’s face screw up in appreciation for a bad pun.) 

Barba hung back, put his weight against the doorway and framed himself like a picture staring back at its artist. It was less the vision that Carisi wanted to _surprise_ Barba, than he wanted very much to see the considering look on Barba’s face, wanted to see interest morph into want morph into satisfaction. Carisi wanted to be taken in through every medium: thought, care, flesh.

And through that exchange, Barba did some teasing of his own, all but posing in a signature look of his own crafting: a handsome suit--dark grey, with a soft plaid detail--paired with a pink and purple accents in the shirt and pocket square, respectively. He’d foregone any tie, lest anyone think he was sticking around for the day. The scarf he’d just unfurled from his neck--Barba regretted taking it off, now--was a visibly soft dove grey cashmere, the perfect addition to bridge the suit with its styling. 

But there was more--fashionings Barba didn’t care to admit, but that Carisi favored above all else. The open button at Barba’s throat, the absence of any gleaming cufflinks, and his _hair_ \--held in place by sheer will, it was touched by only a haste palming of product, and given to a little bounce. His comely visage was ever-so-slightly coming apart, and Carisi loved that: the wrinkle of fabric, a peek of skin, touchable hair. It was no less an honest version of the man, but strangely, a more striking one than even a sharply rendered look of immaculate construction. 

Those were the looks Barba fulfilled-- _very nicely_ \--but these, with the edges peeled back, held every fantasy Barba had about himself, and broke them hard against the reality.

And still, he was a sight to behold. 

All the same, Barba didn’t feel like he was the one demanding attention. He wasn’t one pair of boxer-briefs away from being naked, after all, splayed out in the center of an unmade bed.

Carisi’s expression was smug in a way Barba absolutely loved, and his posturing was crass in a way Barba pretended he _didn’t._

“Have you been waiting long?” Barba asked, trying to sound casual. He steadied his hands to slowly remove his jacket, and walked coolly to the closet to slip it over a hanger. 

“Hours,” Carisi grinned. “Just like this.”

“M-hm,” Barba turned, sidled up to the side of the bed closest to Carisi, and leaned in--not enough to partake, but just to get a better sense of the man, and tease his involvement. 

Barba smelled mint in the air. 

“You brushed your teeth,” he said, and searched Carisi’s form for still more deceits. 

“Just like this,” Carisi insisted, his smile now twisted up in delight. “One hand working each of ‘em.”

“Won’t your dentist be pleased,” Barba noted, and slowly set about taking off his trousers and shirt. He took care with his clothes; he even folded the shirt before placing it in a nearby hamper. Both the show of dexterity with his hands and the agonizing wait for Barba to handle him with similar care had Carisi quaking with anticipation.

“Jesus, Raf, if you don’t help me out here, I’m gonna have to see a guy about my carpal tunnel.”

He sounded weak, breathless already. His whining made Barba smile. It fell more on the side of absurd than abused, in large part to Carisi’s stature. That this tall, competent young man could only plead for his own release was a better joke than ever Barba had heard to split his sides. For as often as Barba tried to make the man beg, however, he found that Carisi could hold out for longer than Barba knew the game to be worth. 

And for his own, Barba got impatient. 

He gave up a long-suffering sigh too soon, and in that most primordial, lizard-part of his brain that tallied his wins and losses, he knew the delighted little smirk on Carisi’s face was the man’s claim to victory. 

Barba gave him a dry, withering look as if to say, _Yes, fine, I want to fuck. You’re beautiful. Happy, now?_

Barba stripped with both speed and precision; nothing was unsteady about his hands. Each button came neatly from its hold, the brace of his suspenders going slack and loose at his sides with one, two touches, and a damn-near lyrical roll of his shoulders: up, then down, and carried clear across. A dance to some unspoken tune. 

When he was bare, he joined Carisi on the bed and sank to his task.

“Wait wait wait--” Carisi said, each word encroaching on the next. He drew Barba up with a hand curling into the man’s armpit. He let his own self ache and twitch as he sought Barba’s gaze and matched it with his own. 

And Barba, awe-struck, looked at him so intensely that his eyes bugged at the effort. 

Carisi couldn’t know how he looked--pupils blown into blackness, lips red, hair a mess of greys and blondes so dirty a kinder man would deem them brown and forgive himself the oversight. All of that, and most stunning of all--a deep and abiding _want_ for Barba that geared his whole body to account for the man’s presence. As surely as Barba felt fingertips grazing his arms, he felt Carisi’s stare penetrate him, fortify itself and settle there, like a conqueror in a new land.

Carisi wanted Barba’s mouth before he took the rest of him. 

They kissed, but it was secondary, it seemed, to simply being in the same room together.

“I want you,” Carisi breathed into the corner of Barba’s mouth, and again against his throat, clavicle, and left shoulder. _“I want you.”_

Barba bucked and rolled his hips high, hard into Carisi’s pelvis. 

“So take me.”

Barba sank pleasantly into bed, Carisi leading him down with arms wrapped about his middle. The going was slow, the landing firm. Barba was not at once turned over on his stomach, and nor did he make the effort. Even hungry for it, Carisi would take care to first praise Barba’s body with his mouth and, because he claimed to care deeply for it, service Barba’s soul with all the tenderness he could muster.

Carisi withdrew and rested his weight on his thighs, and lorded himself over Barba. His gaze traveled over all that he’d already had, touching it again with reverence and certainty. Where another man might have found monotony, Carisi saw only incredible fortune in having had all this, and the very near prospect of having it again and again. 

The air pricked Barba’s skin as he read intent in Carisi’s readying form, longing and want and untold desire on his lips, eyes, and the heaving of his skinny torso, the latter appearing almost alien in its intensity. 

Barba threw an arm out and met the bedside table, and from the top drawer procured a condom and bottle of lubricant. He pitched both into Carisi’s face, with only the condom making contact with his cheek.

“It hurts just to look at you,” he said, his voice low but warm with good humor. He looked appreciatively at Carisi’s erection. “Use it or lose it.”

Carisi didn’t need to be told twice. 

And Barba delighted in the heat, the pressure, the all-encompassing ache that reverberated through every cell of his body. He could even appreciate the drag of his cheek against the bedsheets because, though soft, a little friction could make a noose from silk if circumstances allowed. 

Barba scoffed that his yuppie Harvard friends had ever once suggested either of their two favorite trends--jogging and cocaine--could afford the body much the same pleasure. 

No, the likes of Trenton Lorde III and James Madison Beaty had never been thoroughly fucked in the ass.

Afterwards, Barba was thoroughly pleased with himself, and thought Carisi should feel the same. He drew his arms up from where they’d gone jelly-loose over the sides of the bed, and gave Carisi a slow, exaggerated round of applause. While it was his tempting and taunting won the lion’s share of Carisi’s interest, turning it fast into deed, no one could say Carisi hadn’t showed initiative. 

Barba felt his body in two distinct forms of satisfaction: that of sex and attitude. He’d been right that Carisi could deliver unto him the former, with just a touch of the latter from Barba’s end. 

Barba sighed happily; he had attitude enough to turn Carisi onto him for a lifetime. 

While he was splayed out, _gloating,_ Carisi, on the contrary, was all creeping blush and sweet kisses that tasted of ‘sorry’ and ‘I shouldn’t have.’ He planted them one by one on his slow sojourn up from Barba’s bare ass to his heaving shoulders. 

“I shouldn’t have done that to you,” Carisi said, and laughed when Barba seemed to titter under him. “Not on Christmas Eve.”

“I’m a little old for sitting on Santa’s lap, if you’re concerned for my discomfort.”

Carisi broke into a fit of snorting laughter outright, but it trailed off as he buried his face in the crook of Barba’s neck, smelling sweat and the lingering hints of a brisk New York morning--smoke and grime and that peculiarly stale courthouse scent. It hugged the roots of his hair and coated his hands, filled the curve of his lip and hid under his brow.

Carisi went for a taste of everything. 

For all their differences--and there were _many_ \--in personality, spirit, philosophies, everything down to pizza toppings, they were wholly alike in this: a shared sense of humor when it came to sex. Granted, there was nothing funny about satisfying a need when it urgently presented itself, and both men had bouts of boundless desire and want for romance tied up amid all the rest, but sex out of boredom? Sex for its own sake, sex because they were awake and without any pressing commitments? 

_Fucking,_ as it were?

It _had_ to be fun by the virtue that it always _was._

Barba’s sharp tongue necessitated a soft, goofy recipient, someone who was made of tougher stuff than he knew, for whom the instinct to feel joy wasn’t always readily recognized as a strength. For his own, Barba had grown weary of perpetual bachelordom, and was all too happy to fall into things with a ready partner. He liked the ease and inconsequentiality of the exchange. 

_Pleasure_ was separate from _love_ in that respect. Barba operated well in those grey areas, thrived on every misdirect of a fading kiss or a touch. There was always more to want and to take, and he drove a hard bargain. 

And though he came to a similar conclusion in a roundabout way, Carisi was likewise of a mind that sex should be smirked at, laughed through, teased out, collapsed into, and thoroughly enjoyed, besides. He saw too much of it in darker tones, and he wanted nothing of the sort. 

But that much was obvious, and Barba suspected Carisi was making still another left turn from his past experiences. Having fun wasn’t the prime concern of a man at war with his own identity, for whom his desire to be loved was consciously and painfully uprooted from his own meaningful self. What better way to counter deliberating self-doubt than an expression of snickering, childish joy?

For years he’d thought, _nice._ He’d thought, _good._ He’d thought, _normal._

Those notions held for every effort made with a woman (and perhaps was why none ever felt so attached that Carisi couldn’t break away amicably), allowing for relations that were _good, nice,_ and _normal,_ but profoundly empty.

Drawing Barba into bed with him, Carisi would sooner see silly or jaunty, famished, giving--even _aching._ He encountered with Barba a whole new language of sex and intimacy, a reality he was sure Barba observed on some level, but was too polite (and Carisi thought if ever there should be a time for it, _now,_ God, _please._ ) to draw attention to, or otherwise shock it with open exposure. Carisi responded with a song all his own, petered out like a twinkling tune under his long fingers, or lost in a gasping breath. 

It was disjointed at times, often paced like a relay. Carisi sometimes fumbled, or handed back precisely what was given to him freely. 

But finally, it was real.

-

Holiday cheer had a brief shelf-life. 

Coming off his high from both Barba’s office party and the quiet night at Benson’s, Carisi was certain there would be more still to enjoy. His family would come around, extend a warm or weary invitation--either would do. He could bring all the broad, lopsided smiles and bawdy laughter himself, lay it like a fine dinner, and invite his family to join in on the better party.

Carisi could _do this._ He simply needed the opportunity.

But no waffling phone call availed him, no sister texted to spill the secret: _Ma knows she’s bring foolish and proud. Of course she wants you both here._

There were phone calls, of course, and texts of varying merit. 

_[Sonny I get it, I do, but Ma is teetering on straight up DISTRAUGHT]_

_[Pick your battles, little brother]_

_[Sonny, really?]_

Barba knew it before Carisi. The matriarch would hold out, and not give in and insist Carisi _and_ Barba join them. Barba was torn; he’d very much have liked to parade around before Carisi, wearing this threadbare show of vindication about his shoulders, to belittle what it was that was meant to make him feel insignificant. Pettiness to mirror pettiness. 

But then, Carisi wouldn’t have enjoyed that, either. 

All day, Carisi busied himself cooking. Side dishes and desserts and things, but never a main course. He prepared his expectations, and despite Barba’s best efforts to cull his attention, to take him to bed and empty his head of any such concerns, Carisi retreated back behind the marble countertops, hands landing on his hips, just above the snug line of his apron, hair coming loose from all the heat. 

When Barba couldn’t cajole Carisi with sex, he did the next best thing. He put on a record, and wide, innocent eyes, and asked for a dance. 

That tactic only bested Carisi’s focus only so long, and in the end Barba found himself drawn into _Carisi’s_ antics in the kitchen. Barba made this concession slowly, first with his arms folded and his nose raised to the smells Carisi was manifesting. Then he became a physical nuisance, pressing against Carisi’s side as he chopped vegetables, sometimes sniffing the odd, bland complaint. “Snow peas?” or “That’s a lot of onion.” 

Carisi gave him the job of peeling mandarin oranges for an orange and cranberry salad. Barba’s fingers were sticky by the task’s end, his breath tangy and sweet for stolen slices. 

Carisi was quick to follow up the minor task with another: washing and halving cranberries.

“They’re small and bitter,” he said. “Made me think of you.”

Barba took the insult and left Carisi both the kitchen and the task. It was a bigger triumph to say nothing at all, to deny Carisi a response and watch him struggle to endure the silence. When Carisi grabbed after him in a bid to make him stay--getting handsy was his go-to routine--Barba only shrugged him off. 

He reclined on the couch, instead, a book in hand though he did not crack it open. He stared at the ceiling, the epitome of his best efforts with a rare day off. He wanted to lounge, to exude laziness in every gesture, to luxuriate amidst that scarce promise struck as a four-way deal between Barba, Carisi, and their respective jobs as ADA and Detective: time. 

And while Carisi made no effort to stop him from lying sideways on the couch and nothing else, Barba could not commit. He wanted to share these fruits, to speak no words but consume every breath of it together, and lose the day between them. 

That wasn’t Carisi’s MO in the slightest. He wished to optimize his efforts, to prepare for later, because today was not yet the prize. 

And that was as much as Barba lived his professional life, but never his personal one. The only outcome Barba wanted was the feeling of satisfaction. Memorializing the moment--much less pacing for the next--did not appeal to him. Here was his day; he wanted only to _have it._

It was that attitude that turned him over on the couch, and set his gaze resolutely on Carisi. 

It was strange to still see him from that angle, Barba thought. 

From below, and halved besides by the outcropping of kitchen counter, Barba was treated to a private viewing of Carisi’s soft, sweet smile--a fixture he surely thought was private, and undoubtedly would have been, had Barba not sought it out like a prized specimen. 

A year in, and the sight had neither dulled nor grown overly familiar. Every time he was made privy to a viewing of that beautiful rendition of contentment, Barba was certain his heart skipped a beat. Taken together, he wondered how long his heart had been stopped. Days? 

Weeks?

It should have been fleeting-- _Carisi,_ as well as the happiness his whole body moved to profess. When Barba wanted to punish himself, or calm his heart as it ratcheted up every expectation, he thought back to how it all began, citing his own empty lust and haunting loneliness. Those months of blowjobs and unkind small talk bartered for company as Barba felt increasingly alone under the weight of intensifying death threats were among the best and worst of his life. He wished to undo them, to have an opportunity again to love Carisi immediately and wholly. 

But barring that, he wouldn’t trade them for any glittering prize.

Even for Barba’s purposes, those early visits were willfully brief in both duration and depth, and at the time Barba excused his own part in that by assuming it was all a part of the package: a young man, having bounced between burroughs and now toeing the line between careers, who bared open adoration and reverence for an older colleague, would take only what he could get. He’d accept scraps served on a silver platter for not knowing better, and return it with a bountiful feast of his time, attention, and favor. Barba would act as though the trade were fair, and for the longest time, Carisi did not doubt him that. 

His ignorance was a strike in Barba’s favor, and so too was his kindness. In some small way, Carisi could know his game and still show up, smiling and wanting and willing. They’d eat or talk or fuck around, and Carisi would forgive Barba at every interval. 

Now, Carisi stood with undeniable durability. Permanence gripped his stance in the kitchen, and the sense of belonging he espoused was palpable. He no longer bandied about Barba, but staked a space for his own, forging his own path.

What a happy accident that they should move in tandem. 

Barba was heartened to see that Carisi was--perhaps foolishly--several steps ahead of him. There was, of course, a simple means of catching up.

The idea had struck him early that morning, though Barba managed to put it off for several hours. Some mid-morning fondling had helped, and the blowjob Carisi favored him with had practically been a stay of execution for his plan. But soon, time was not on his side, and Barba knew he had to act or suffer the consequences. 

He stood, stretched, made sure Carisi took in the view of taut raised arms and arched back. He went to the bedroom to dress--casual, nothing so fine that he’d risk among the hordes he suspected on the afternoon before Christmas--then collected his wallet, phone, keys, and an absently-given kiss from Carisi. 

“You going out?” Carisi asked after the fact. Barba didn’t necessarily feel compelled to answer him; he’d already gotten the goodbye-kiss. 

“Have to run a quick errand,” Barba said while drawing on a scarf. Keys in hand, he paused. He surveyed the great mass of food brought into a more refined existence by Carisi’s hand, put into the oven or stewed together, the scents intermingling and boasting an impressively refined aroma. 

“I’d planned to take you out to dinner tonight,” Barba said, eyeing the feast speculatively. “Should I scrap the reservation?”

“Huh?” Carisi asked as he bent to taste from a sauce he’d left to simmer. A six-hour commitment, as he’d told Barba. _At least._ He waved his hand once the question caught up to him.

“Nah, ‘course we can go out.”

Barba hummed noncommittally, stole another kiss, and let himself out of his apartment. 

-

Within two hours, Barba had completed his errand and secured every receipt. Arms heavy with bags and brow furrowed with a headache stirred by the holiday crowds, he arrived back at his building. The doorman smiled and Barba rolled his eyes; he still hoped it would not come to this. 

Back in his apartment, barba found Carisi was not as he’d left him, smiling and satisfied over a litany of recipes old and new. 

Instead, the corners of his mouth had drawn together as if some great show had ended, and the heavy curtain swung closed. Carisi had arrived at the same conclusion as Barba, though he’d been slow getting there. In the matter of coming together for both Christmas and conciliation, pride ran thick among the Carisis, and his family would hold out. Rather than entertain the unusual, they’d grip tradition in a vice, denying Barba and expelling Carisi in the process. 

Unexpectedly, Barba felt a rush of tremendous guilt, as though he had not long known this should be the outcome. 

He stared, tracking the realization as it passed over Carisi’s brow, cupped his cheeks, and scolded his demeanor into something small and hunched.

Carisi’s thumb hovered over the text feature on his phone, though the screen had faded to black in the time he put towards indecision--and after that, waiting. 

Waiting and waiting and _waiting._

Barba had no way of knowing the text that had stalled Carisi’s buzzing excitement, though he could have guessed at the sentiment. 

_[wish you were here]_ had arrived by his mother’s hand, phrased like he was on the other side of the world, and not just Manhattan.

Carisi had written back at once: _[so invite us]_

Nothing. Waiting, and nothing. 

Carisi relinquished his phone as he stood up from the table and looked upon the haphazard feast of his creation, embarrassed for its breadth. It was surely meant for a wider audience. 

“You want to eat some of this, I guess?”

“It'll keep,” Barba told him. He angled his voice towards kind, and whether Carisi heard the undertones of superiority or merely imagined them, he responded to their creeping insinuation. 

“I’m an idiot.”

“That’s only for me to say,” Barba teased, offering a gentle smile. He nodded at the phone--the true enemy, here--and asked, “What happened?”

Carisi’s open, empty palms said as much, but he repeated himself nonetheless: “Nothing.”

“It’s almost nice out,” Barba observed, and suggested they take a walk. “You smell like six kinds of spices. Let's air you out.” 

-

For a rare reprieve in an unusually cool season, New York City was altogether milder than the winter had yet known. Their hands sank comfortable into their respective coat pockets, though Barba was tempted to brace for the cold and expose them, and let his touch find refuge on Carisi’s back or elbow. He found an excuse to do while leading Carisi out of a cafe--he needed to stop for coffee--and again towards a patch of browned green space at the opening of Central Park. They wandered from there, following a footpath and passing grounds still streaked with day-old snow.

They were passed by a few joggers--figures of latex layers and knit hats, with hot breath breaking the air with every stride. Barba wished he’d suggested that--a run, or something like, to better take Carisi’s mind off his family, and Barba, too. His place in all that was fixed, loathe though he was to admit it. He was to blame, or at least such was the family’s thinking. And if Carisi was worth the shine on his tin, he’d surely take the time to appreciate their view, to consider the scene set before them as the decision to crowd him out was made.

They spilled out into an open swath of park, where normally there would be sunbathers and people seeking just a moment of purest sunshine out of their day spent twenty stories into the sky in an office cubical. Now, under a haze of snow and inescapable cold, the area was mostly bare. 

Couples walked the area. Barba pegged them for not-so-native New Yorkers--maybe tourists from the south where this sort of weather keld some pleasant novelty. Or, given Carisi’s penchant for stumbling upon Haligonians, maybe these people were seeking out a little familiarity. 

Either way, they passed like spectres, at first so lazily they seemed to have gone perfectly still, and the next instant, they’d disappeared. 

The scene was strikingly serene. Barba was impressed; he didn’t think New York had it in her.

Carisi, to Barba’s surprise, was not watching the promenade of handsome couples coaxing a fairytale scene from a few patches of snow and air that seemed to teeter on that razor's edge between ice and some drizzle. Instead, his gaze was pitched somewhere over the barren treetops, striking slivers of glass buildings, in which there was nothing to see save for the reflection of an endless grey sheet masquerading as a sky. 

As Barba spoke, he didn’t so much hear himself as he saw his breath cascade outwards, catch the light, and color the air a ghostly shade. 

“What did you think I meant when I said your family would disappoint you?”

He watched his words register across his lover’s cold-pinched face.

“That yours had disappointed you,” Carisi murmured. An honest admission, though his pink cheeks weren’t the result of shame or embarrassment. He was far too hurt to consider ancillary feelings. 

“...And mine were different.”

It was the opposite for Barba; pity carried him deep into silence. 

Carisi continued, “I get that I’ve hurt her--”

“No.”

Barba cut him off like a school teacher might, advising on a new language, and halting poor pronunciation before it really took off. If it fell into one’s lexicon even once, it was that much more difficult to root out.

“That she feels hurt,” Carisi corrected, the effort labored and slow. “But, _seriously?”_

The rest came much faster.

“Seriously, I’m not invited home on Christmas? _Seriously?_ I don’t know which is worse: that they’re pretending it’s because of you, or that I’m going around thinking it’s not because of me.” 

Barba let Carisi have his moment, watched him huff and pout and be every bit as indignant as he felt. The man had earned this much; never had he let his smiling facade slip so low as to reveal a bitter grimace and bright, angry eyes. 

Gently, Barba answered back, “It’s absurd. Unreasonable. And your response…” Barba shook his head. “No matter what, it’s going to feel like that, too. They’ve set the terms.” 

Carisi nodded once--a gesture more akin to all the air seeping out of a balloon. They didn’t speak again until they’d cleared the park, exiting from the opposite direction from which they’d come, simply in an effort to continue their walk. 

They even entered and departed a cafe, coffees in hand, without exchanging a word. 

“It’s okay to be disappointed,” Barba said when they'd rounded a corner, far away from the main drags and towards a row of finer brownstones--the kind where the City bent to the pressure to tastefully decorate the trees and lamps with twinkling lights and wreaths, respectively. 

Barba added, “You won't always feel that way.”

“It’s dumb,” Carisi said, and Barba’s heart sank with the realization that Carisi had gone well through every available emotion and landed at that old standby: dismissal. 

He said, “I shouldn't be so caught up in it now. It's just a holiday. I've had a hundred with them.” 

“That’s not what's upsetting.” Barba kept his eyes set dead ahead. There was more light now--not much, but compared to recent weeks it should qualify as blinding--and it colored every wet patch of sidewalk gold. By this happy accident, the city became a glowing tapestry of storied excess; it was every story told of it from far away, and then some. 

“The occasion is irrelevant; what hurts is the implication that you're not welcome. Or, only welcome to a _point.”_

Barba wished he had more austere words for the matter; he longed to take Carisi on a fantastical journey led by the twists of his sharp tongue, losing him to abstraction. But it was as childish as it sounded, and grander words would not lend any greater meaning.

The situation--Carisi’s _life_ \--was already corrupted. Influences took root in childhood, great tortuous tales of good and evil, and a supreme bit of branding, besides, but Barba did not discard the latest trends. He’d fucked this man, sated his need for physicality and performance. 

There was something to that, too.

“Your family wants you in their lives and wants to be in yours. They just… only want the parts of you they know and like.” 

Just as quickly as Barba had set his gaze, he broke it to glance lifelong at his lover. He saw the man's expression curl deep into thought at the premises Barba was laying out. 

“And if that's enough for you, if that compromise makes more sense than not, you shouldn't be made to feel like you've failed some test. _I_ shouldn't make you feel that way.” Barba sipped his coffee, his throat suddenly dry. It was for naught; there was no healing this old wound.

“I can only tell you that I couldn't make that compromise,” Barba said. In this, he was resolute. “I can't promise I'm any happier for it, but self-righteousness was always more my thing.” 

He tried to smile. What emerged on his face was anyone's guess; something like bemusement, but crowded with shame. At once, Barba was sure he didn't like it, and chased it off with steely resolve. He couldn't make Carisi believe any different than he already did, but there was something to be said for finally soothing the man’s pain.

“They'll say you chose this life and--really--that's not entirely wrong. How honest you're willing to be with yourself and others is a choice.” It wasn't the kindest of truths when reflected back on himself, but Barba knew that wasn't the point. “And right or wrong--if it makes you more happy than not, it's the right choice.” 

Carisi smiled sort of sideways at that. It was a better outcome than Barba’s attempt, but not by much. 

“Moral relativism, really?”

“You caught me feeling generous,” Barba returned, his lips pursed. 

Carisi leaned into him as they walked: just a simple brushing of shoulders. But there was no mistaking them for amiable strangers or recent acquaintances; the walking in pace with one another, the speaking in quiet, gentle tones--these were achievements as well as actions. 

One didn’t so readily find their stride in another human being without some intent.

With that thought in mind, Barba held himself a little taller. The repercussions hit in steady succession: his shoulders, pushing them back despite the cold; his gaze, lifting it well above street level; the whole of his right side, inching closer to Carisi as they walked. Slowly but surely, Barba felt the air sharpen with the promise of snow--maybe later that night, maybe just a few flurries. He felt better all the same, knowing there was something simple out in the world that would meet his expectations. 

With Carisi, he was never quite so sure.

“So?”

Carisi seemed to weigh the idea physically; sides to an argument he’d never dreamed to making aloud took hold of one shoulder, then the next. 

“I told you awhile back that I didn't want to get angry. That I didn't think I could, and still feel good about what I was doing.”

Barba nodded as if he agreed, let alone understood. 

“And are you? Angry?”

At once, Barba was mortified. His voice was unmistakably quiet, meek, sorry. Like a child’s, seeking forgiveness but fearing retribution. Barba sounded miserable, enough so that it was like he’d said precisely what he meant: _Have I made you unhappy?_

Carisi shrugged and lifted his gaze again. _Buildings,_ Barba thought at once. Then realized he’d been wrong all along. Carisi was looking for something loftier still.

_Divinity._

“I don’t know. No. Sad, maybe? And--tired. Like, really tired.”

Barba reminded himself of the last time Carisi felt so conflicted, so miserable with his circumstances. He’d gone to a priest, confessed to something he didn't understand, and in lieu of genuine insight, had the reality of his desires tangled up and fashioned into sin.

Barba didn't want to be another voice telling him to wait, to doubt. He wished he had answers beyond his own: cut them off, banish any and all dissenters. _Your well-being isn't a democracy._

_No one else gets a vote._

His time with Barba allowed Carisi some insight into his drawn expression; he knew the man was rife with the sharpest of arguments, each deadly in its own way, whether cutthroat or by sheer blunt force. He readied himself for the blow. 

And maybe he flinched in preparation, or maybe Barba was going soft all the same, but he saved his words, and spared Carisi their injury. 

_“Anyway,”_ Barba drawled, and it was as if he’d taken the moment by the shoulders and heaved it back into his old self, all wry tones and cool wits. “I love you. If that's any consolation.”

He sported a neither here-nor-there expression, a purposefully bizarre cross between an exaggerated frown and hapless smile. A look, no doubt, cultivated on Carisi’s own lovely face, bastardized for Barba’s purposes. 

_I love you,_ it said. _Look how stupid I am over how much I love you._

For his own, Carisi co-opted a look so thoroughly _Barba,_ with all the lip-pursing annoyance and raised, wrinkled brow over purposefully half-lidded eyes, the man himself very nearly gave him a round of applause. 

Carisi coupled this with a dismissive, “Eh.” 

Then Carisi smiled and Barba smiled back, though neither felt the other to be entirely sincere. It was enough to fake the effort, to imagine it being real and taking comfort in the fantasy, and soon Carisi’s steps did seem lighter. He asked about dinner, and Barba answered him, and together they took still more steps away from whatever heartache they shared, the exchange unbalanced but better for splitting. 

The way Carisi looked at him… again, Barba was struck with the realization: divinity. Carisi could find it anywhere, it seemed.

Barba only made it three more blocks before accepting his fate, inasmuch as Carisi’s wants and needs should guide it. 

He sent a series of texts: 

_[Carisi wants to know if you have plans Christmas day.]_

_[If you wouldn’t mind some good company.]_

_[Also me.]_

-

Barba awoke slowly, eyes lifting in tandem with the dull light passing through the slits in the blinds. His body grew aware of a purposeful hand tracing circles on his side well before his mind caught up and put a name to the effort. 

He turned onto his side, huffing a tired breath into the face of his culprit. Carisi was there, all half-lidded eyes and sweet smile. The soft light was doing a number on his lashes, catching them just so as to throw their shadow on his pale cheeks. He was likewise slow to rise, because although his sleep had been fitful, it was over-long, leaving him supple and warm between the sheets, but anxious in his own being there. He was the physical embodiment of thinking he’d forgotten something--an unminded stove or unlocked door, only here it was surely his soul left unattended. 

Barba smoothed a complementary hand across Carisi’s cheek to silence all that. 

It worked like a charm, and suddenly Carisi sank into his touch, looking so calm, so quiet, so entirely at peace. Words were not needed to answer for the pleasurable ache in his heart. And _Barba_ \--in realizing in him there was an untold power, some newfound ability to make a good man love him, was thunderstruck. He could have awoken to a hundred mornings such as this, and still couldn’t be sure anymore that his life was not the slow dawning of an unfathomable dream. 

Because again, Barba was awed by the permanence Carisi exuded, lying beside him on a morning every good Catholic would find themselves in church. His body was entirely still, save for those slow, paced breaths. Not a single muscle twitched towards movement, or hinted at escape. Barba stroked Carisi’s soft hair--a transparent attempt at confirming his reality that could just as well be mistaken for tenderness.

As so it was: Carisi smiled, and Barba was transfixed.

How fully did he have this man?

Barba inched forward and kissed him, believing if the laws of physics allowed, Carisi would have melted, the bulk of him sinking into the mattress, the rest fusing with the bedsheets, and traces of him forever lingering on Barba’s lips. 

“Good morning,” Barba said, and was pleased that speaking did not break the spell. Carisi remained as loose and relaxed, as surely as though he were pictured in the veritable lap of luxury. He had Barba’s bed, Barba’s embrace--nothing too luxurious outside the threadcount, by Barba’s guess, but who was he to sneer at someone’s enjoyment of his paltry offerings?

(Except that was _exactly_ who he was.)

Almost an afterthought, Barba added, “Merry Christmas.”

Carisi laughed in delight. Their work had spilled over many a holiday, but never before--not once in all the years Carisi had known him--had Barba wished him well on a holiday. It seemed fitting that he should only start after they awoke in bed together. If this was what it’d take, Carisi would see to it they shared a bed for every Flag, Groundhog, and Memorial Day to come.

“It’s weird to be sleepin’ in. Kinda wrong.”

“Sloth looks good on you.” 

Carisi stretched an arm up, out, and drew it back around Barba’s shoulders, bringing him closer still. A power-move, had Carisi not joined it with an idiotic growl. 

Barba, whose eyes were traveling down Carisi’s body and who had plans to follow gamely, dropped dead just shy of the man’s navel. 

“Don’t you dare think I wasn’t already going to do this,” Barba gritted out, hands flat on Carisi’s hips and in search of that softest skin under his boxers. “That _noise_ did not endear me to you in the slightest.”

“Mhmm… you can stop anytime you want t-- _oh._ ”

Barba’s counterargument was something of an unfair advantage, but Carisi couldn’t find it in him to complain. He let himself be taken into Barba’s mouth, into a grip Barba mastered with his whole self--fingers digging into his ass, mouth wet, arms bracing his thighs and shoulders arching back to give Carisi space to curl a leg over the broad shelf of muscle and bone. 

Carisi, Barba had decided, was due a reward. He was well and truly moved by Carisi’s stalwart presence, though his willingness to stay in bed was not wholly comparable to Barba’s one-time attendance of mass on Staten Island, but better, surely. For the both of them.

He couldn’t say as much, of course. _This is because you didn’t up and leave me in your Sunday best_ wasn’t much in the way of a sweet nothing Carisi would want to hear. Barba made sure to convey the sentiment silently, and to completion. 

And for what it was worth, Carisi gasped out enough _oh God, oh God, oh God_ s to merit a prayer.

Barba kept the effort tight, neat and clean, so he didn’t have to abandon the bed in order to tidy them both up. Carisi extended a long arm and roused a wet wipe from Barba’s bedside table. He was flushed from head to toe, the latter of which were still indecently curled and resting, now, on the curve of Barba’s ass. 

Pettily, there were things Barba knew Carisi saw when he looked at him: greying hair, permanent dark bags under his eyes, ever-deepening wrinkles criss-crossing his face, showcasing how easily he fell into displeasure, and forging into his brow like the lines of a child’s coloring book. From the university photos Carisi so adored of him, Barba only retained his bright, keen eyes and his best smug smile. 

But there were ways enough to close Carisi’s eyes to pleasure, and treat him with all the youthful vigor he deserved. 

Barba finished the whole endeavor with a chaste kiss to his lips and pleased reminder that they could do anything they wanted that day--the afternoon was theirs. Carisi hummed, liking the sound of that. 

“What about the morning?” he asked, eyes already fluttering closed as he imagined more sleep. 

The answer came as a nonchalant, “Oh, we have plans.” 

Carisi didn’t know otherwise until he’d heaved himself out of bed and towards the strong brew of coffee Barba was already half a cup into. On the bartop counter Barba had heaped a roll of wrapping paper, some assorted mismatched ribbon, and baby gifts. 

“For Rollins’ kid,” Barba specified quickly, fearing he knew precisely where Carisi’s thoughts would fly to, and with some force.

He explained casually that Rollins expected them around ten, and if he didn’t want to be late, Carisi would help with the wrapping. Or do it all, considering Barba didn’t plan on doing any.

Barba didn’t get the opportunity--or need it, besides--to claim this was all in service to that old adage of not showing up empty handed, because Carisi crossed the kitchen in an instant, and met him hard and fast with a kiss. He tasted an abundance of coffee, but sweetness, too. It was that heavy, distinctly _Barba_ flavor forever present on the man’s skin, his tongue, in his body--however far Carisi reached, he sank closer to that fragrant core. 

He knew better.

He knew _Barba_ was better than he’d ever attribute to himself, tremendously and often, in all the ways that mattered most: kinder, more considerate, and constantly guided by that oft-denied big heart of his. His work wouldn’t condense his life, otherwise; he would never abandon the opera during intermission if he wasn’t first guided to help rather than to satisfy. 

He wasn’t the slick, fast-talker with a smile cut sideways on a devilishly handsome face, set to be raised smugly over an expensive suit rendered with impeccable style. 

Or, he wasn’t _just_ that. 

This was more-or-less the day Carisi had lost the opportunity to spend with his own family--with his sister, his tiny niece. 

A family Christmas was what Carisi needed, even if it was someone else’s.

The kiss slowly became an embrace, and Carisi was slower still to depart. His mouth was hot on Barba’s neck, his nose pressed and breathing in wet hair and the scent of shampoo. His breath emerged shuddering, as if Barba had just drawn Carisi in from the cold. When they parted, Barba had the good grace to roll his eyes and wrinkle his nose in annoyance after Carisi’s heartfelt display. 

“You’re happy, then? I can send the pony I’ve got stored in my trunk back to the glue factory from whence it came?”

Carisi ignored him and immediately availed himself to the task Barba had set for him, taking everything in one armful to the dining table. 

“Can I say? I saw this earlier and thought it was for me.”

Barba hid a smirk behind his coffee mug. He dropped a hip against the kitchen counter and leaned coolly against its edge. 

“You thought I bought you two bags of things from a baby boutique?” 

Carisi gestured to the bags; he hadn’t known what was in them. 

“I figured you were trying to be inconspicuous.” 

Barba strode over to the mess of Carisi’s making and plucked a rather large, vaguely cone-shaped plastic caterpillar rattle from one of the bags. He let the thing flop from side to side by its kinked tail. 

“I can’t imagine what you thought I had in store.” 

Carisi grinned at him, a vision almost too wholesome in its childish delight. Barba sipped his coffee and watched Carisi return to his work and grow increasingly excited for the prospect of putting it to plan. His lips twitched around unspoken words; his eyes glittered bright and sought Barba’s own at every opportunity.

It was entirely too sweet a response for so calculated an effort. 

“Stop,” Barba insisted, and grimaced for good measure. 

Carisi did no such thing.

-

Rollins greeted them with a bemused smile, a thing unsettled on her face as if she still doubted they'd show, even after a bizarre text exchange from Barba assuring just that. 

_Just stopping by with some food_ was all she expected; that was certainly Carisi’s go-to, and she suspected he could incline Barba to as much so long as the visit was brief. Surely, the ADA had things he’d rather be doing on Christmas morning than visiting a toddler-proofed apartment.

As the layers of outerwear came off and the depth of their respective parcels revealed themselves, however, Rollins realized quickly they were in for the long haul. 

Carisi was a brazen display of wide smile, pink cheeks, and that hideous deerstalker-ushanka hybrid he so favored for its practicality, as it lacked anything close to style. His hands were laden with two reusable grocery bags heavy with gifts for Jesse, evidenced by their oversized shapes or rattling. Barba was tucked away a short ways behind him, nearly lost behind a file box--one he’d brought home from work, no doubt--packed with dishes and containers topped in aluminum foil. He couldn't get a hand free to take off the snow covered hat, and was none too pleased for this supposed failure of self-imposed decorum. 

They made for quite a picture, and Rollins’ smile quickly turned wide and genuine.

“When’d you guys get all this stuff?” she asked while welcoming them in. 

“Yesterday,” Carisi answered, despite his uninvolvement. After kicking off his shoes and discarding his jacket, he made a beeline to Jesse, and Rollins looked to Barba in his stead, catching him watching the whole of Carisi’s retreating figure with soft eyes.

When they cut to Rollins, they weren’t so soft. They’d drawn back as if rushed by a terrible thought. Unbeknownst to Rollins, Barba was suddenly mortified with his behavior: not just swindling her holiday, but providing all the trappings. What he’d worried was disgustingly sweet and uncharacteristically _dear_ of him was now every shade of _pathetic._

Or worse--perhaps she saw in Barba a new level of deceitfulness and scheming to which Barba’s own pride shielded him from seeing in himself. Who can know their worst selves wholly, if not for lacking the instinctive capability to protect themselves from a hideous vision?

He tempered those thoughts, pushed them down and away, as if he could hold them behind his back she wouldn’t think to look there.

“Contingency plan,” he answered shortly. 

“It’s not the holidays without one,” she returned, and Barba looked at her as if it was a tossup as to whether he believed she was sincere or just teasing him. 

Rollins asked, like she meant to sway him one way or the other, “Coffee, Counselor?”

He waved her off; he could fix himself a cup. Rollins joined Carisi and Jesse, and the three were all smiles as they set upon the child’s impromptu Christmas. Carisi snapped photographs while Frannie bounced happily around them, digging her nose into all the activity, the stray paper. Barba, having made space in the fridge for all of Carisi’s dishes, found himself standing aimless and wary. He fixed himself that cup of proffered coffee, then spied a newspaper on the counter and lost himself to the cause. 

Only Jesse’s happy coos and Rollins’ humbled murmurings of thanks interrupted his focus. Admittedly, Barba hadn't given the gifts much thought. He’d found a handsome display window and secured a healthy sum of it. He knew well enough to avoid clothes--surely there was some nugget of truth to all that talk of, _she’s getting so big_ \--but after that, he was flying blind. 

(Though, he did stick his neck out to see how the pair of snakeskin print booties was received, because he was partial to the look of them. From Rollins, that response came as a wild howl of delight.) 

For his distance from the scene, Barba assumed this reasoning: he was glad to have made appropriate choices, but he didn’t need to revel in them. There was enough of that: Carisi practically cheered at every tear Jesse made in the wrapping paper, and Rollins had adorned herself with a bow stuck to her shirt like a blooming corsage. 

There was something about their dual pale complexions and blue eyes, Barba thought, that seemed revelatory on their own. 

Rollins left the festivities to refresh her own coffee. As she departed, all socked feet and warmly tired smile, Rollins drew her hair into a messy ponytail, signaling that picture time was over. 

“Hey,” she said, and ducked her head to catch Barba’s eye. He was deep into a story about a recent police acquittal in the midwest, as evidenced by the hard line of his mouth and the set of his jaw over teeth that surely suffered nightly grinding as a result of exactly this endlessly depressing and apparent precedent. He snapped out of that space and flipped to the Lifestyle section--a literal papering over of the nation’s constant ills.

“You’re making a racket over here,” she joked. “I got called in to see about the disturbance.”

Barba’s mouth twisted into something like a smile, but before he could shoot off some smart comment, his phone lit up beside him, buzzing with the arrival of a new text, and his expression fell squarely into a grimace. 

He glanced at Rollins like he’d been caught doing something-- _feeling something_ \--wrong. 

Terror and unease manifested themselves as hard-won lessons over the course of a year; he still hadn’t quite unlearned them. 

“Sorry for barging in on you like this,” Barba said for what must have been--at least--the third time. He realized while driving by Carisi’s wordy directions that he’d made the suggestion with Carisi in mind, not Rollins. There had been her offhand invitation at Benson’s party the other night-- _stop by, huh?_ \--but nothing so as to suggest she’d actually meant it.

Her bright smile said otherwise.

“Are you kidding? Free food and baby swag? What are you guys doing for New Year’s?”

Barba smiled too, but was still embarrassed. He’d crossed every line with Carisi, yet--perhaps foolishly--he’d hoped to maintain some sense of decorum and professionalism with the rest of the detectives in SVU. And therein was another miscalculation: he could not roll up to a colleague’s home on Christmas day, and think for one second he was going to get by using open cases as his sole means of conversation. 

“Again--”

“Counselor,” she warned, and joined Barba at the tiny blue card table that served as a workspace, dining area, and--in a pinch, though Barba certainly didn’t need to know--a changing table. 

She opened her mouth, thinking she had more to say, a means of being the kind of friendly Carisi hoped she’d be, but faltered, and continued lamely, “You can check your emails, if you want.” 

Barba seemed to soften at that all the same, so Rollins took it as a win. 

She decided he had the right idea, and together they took a break from their respective wards. Jesse, at least, had the good sense to be an infant, and therefore blissfully content living in the world Rollins laid out for her, all mashed peas and hummed songs and slobbering dog kisses. Carisi only babbled on like one while talking to the child and encouraging her to play with her assorted Christmas spoils. 

In truth, Barba felt as though he’d failed Carisi in that respect. He hadn’t effectively cleared a path for the young man to take out into the wilder word, and aborted attempts at expanding Carisi’s social circle were all too prevalent, and even then Barba was grading himself on a curve. 

Because, despite everything, Carisi seemed happy. 

It helped that Carisi was wont to tell him that being honest turned out to be a mixed bag, but that being with a man he loved never produced any shortcomings. Barba could only eschew credit for so long; he wore _courteous_ like an Armani suit, but _humble_ was a bulky knit sweater, and Barba didn’t much like the figure he cut in it, anyway. 

Looking around her apartment, Barba was hardly surprised to find it echoed Carisi’s, and all the things he didn’t particularly like therein: small, crowded, homely. Comfortable spaces were prioritized when it came to square footage, but sorely lacking in execution. There was a couch out of necessity, and the television and books felt salvaged. It was as though Rollins and Carisi recognized the systems of comfort, and plastered them up. 

Barba didn’t know what else he expected from their kind: detectives with big, heavy hearts and long memories. That they couldn’t fully actualize peace even when they arranged it in their homes was telling, though hardly a surprise. 

It was right that she and Carisi were friends, that Carisi enjoyed Rollins’ company, and Rollins in turn pretended having him around didn’t warm her heart and ease her load. 

Barba thought, _They would have been good together._

The thought alone felt invasive, because Barba got the feeling Rollins had once allowed herself the very same flight of fancy. There was no possible way for Barba to simply acknowledge the notion independently, as he was in a brighter place than her, the winner’s circle, and his opinion would always be colored as such. 

Rollins had all the things Carisi desired, but Barba was _who_ he had, the man he came back to and spelled love for in every breath exuded in one another’s presence. 

His and Rollins realities, Barba knew, were not in contest.

Barba was concerned with deserving her ire all the same; he _wanted_ her to like him, to see him alongside Carisi and, as the younger man’s closest friend, approve of his being there.

Barba found he could trust Benson’s quiet happiness for him--it was there in every wry smile and soft word--but Rollins? With her big, watchful blue eyes and seemingly nothing to say? Rollins, who had held pace with Barba as he worked to cement a sense of professionalism in a working relationship that had all but ruptured between him and her closest colleague? Rollins, who mimed his efforts in her Southern accent, but likely didn’t believe a lick of it? 

He realized now, only sat in her presence, that he’d been wary of reproach. She was sharper than her soft, undeniably pretty features would suggest, and Barba believed he was right to be cautious. It was there in the way she looked at him, like she saw clear through and searched his edges instead, scouring the man-shaped landscape for depth enough to get lost in. 

He worried she didn’t see any.

He worried she did.

Such was why Barba steered himself toward cool politeness. Though not the most subtle of departures from his usual ferocity (running only in varying degrees of hot and scalding), it was safest. Barba knew he had an attitude to keep in check, and anger deep inside him to fuel its constant beating right alongside his heart. Though he did not fear acting on that anger--he knew himself better, _was_ better, and everyday he chose otherwise--he didn’t want shades of it seen by anyone, except in that controlled environment of court, where those who knew him could pass it off as showmanship, and those who didn’t--well, they were seeing more of Barba than most of his lovers could have ever claimed to see. Any awe was stricken from the exchange from jump; they didn’t know they were privy to anything special.

Barba had seen Rollins’ skillset firsthand; she could root murderous secrets out of men, and his was only tied up in pride, and was nothing as ruinous, even if it felt that way. He hesitated doing anything--smiling for her, _not_ smiling, smiling at Carisi--for fear of what she’d see there. 

“Relax, Counselor.”

Rollins’ honey-sweet drawl landed a little too soft, and Barba promptly raised an eyebrow, as if to question the very insinuation. She seemed to read his thoughts and was revelling in the wide annals of his mind, open as it was to her, at least, where it regarded her partner. 

His was the face of a man in love, and fretting terribly for that fact. It was a wonder they’d kept things under wraps for as long as they did. She’d seen Carisi’s happiness, but hadn’t broadened her search for the source. 

And now, he was sitting awkwardly at her kitchen table.

“Comfortable?” she asked--another sentiment that ran deeper than the idle curiosity she attached to it. 

“Perfectly,” was Barba’s downright chilly reply. It could have come in from the cold on his nose, or been shaken from his shoulders along with the snow. 

She set down her coffee and angled herself to better view the scene Carisi made, curled happily around her daughter as she sat in his lap, surrounded by ribbons and paper, a new toy already wet with her saliva and sporting teething marks. 

Carisi was handsomely dressed in a slim-fit wool shirt, untucked, colored a cool blue-grey-green that was altogether more sophisticated than Carisi could spot in nature. That it was Barba’s suggestion--or doing, more like--was Rollins’ baseline assumption. Where Carisi held steadfast was in his worn jeans and woolly socks, the latter which he’d stuffed into a pair of old tennis shoes he didn’t mind sacrificing to the weather in the name of comfort. 

In Barba, Rollins was likewise surprised to find Carisi’s influence. While Barba was not so inclined to part with his handsome Chelsea boots in the company of a dog and a child, he had forgone a suit or even a blazer, opting for a level of casual assemblage Rollins could count on one hand for all the years she’d known him. The colors were still lush and rich, from the deep, rich eggplant of his dress shirt to the peak of boldest gold in his socks (because Barba would stop peacocking for no man), but there was hereto unknown softness to the textures. _Touchability,_ of all things, which Rollins supposed was for Carisi’s benefit. 

“I heard you met the parents,” she said, her expression waning as what should have been a bemusing thing carried an all-around different weight. Much of that came as a reflection of Barba, whose gaze cut across the table and lodged itself in the wall. 

“It went about as well as you think,” he said, and sounded strangely hollow, as if he’d stripped the meat from the words and presented her only calcified bone. 

“At least it’s done,” Rollins offered. 

She didn’t know it, but her idle commentary mirrored how Barba felt after the meeting. The day was as much a win as it was a loss, as Carisi would not ask of Barba’s patience again--a resounding win, inasmuch as Barba hadn’t wanted to cross that line in the first place. 

But in retrospect, he regretted letting their discomfort compound with his. He should have been his whole, bombastic self, hitting them with sharper words and cooler smiles, which, once fitted into a bespoke suit, was an amalgamation of his best self. Barba didn’t suspect he’d be given the opportunity to make a second impression.

“At least it’s done,” he agreed.

Then, Rollins smiled a smile so soft and whole, Barba knew at once it was for something well beyond him. 

“He’s good with her,” Rollins said of Carisi and her daughter.

The look that swung from Barba to Rollins hit like the blade of an axe. 

“What did he tell you.”

His eyes, his voice--everything did the impressive dance of both narrowing to a sharp point and blunting the end. Barba spoke clearly, but quietly, and Rollins inexplicably followed his lead, throwing her voice like a cause under the noise from the television set--a Christmas movie, _How the Grinch Stole Christmas,_ which Jesse couldn’t get enough of. 

“Nothing,” she said. “But I’ll tell you this much, Counselor, I don’t need three guesses as to what’s up.”

Barba was glad, then, not to have to say it. The words hid at the backs of his teeth: _Yes, that. It’s so abundantly clear I’m actively denying Carisi this big beautiful family he wants--both the one he has, and his imaginary prospects. It’s all my handiwork. Conscious and deliberate and prolonged._

He said only, “I am a heinous person.”

It summed things up rather neatly, he thought.

“Oh, please,” Rollins said with a roll of her eyes. “Look at who you’re talking to.” Her posture changed, going conspiratorial to match with her tone. “I love that child with everything I am. I don’t regret a second I have with her. But I would have never chosen this for myself, you know?”

Barba looked uneasy, hearing Rollins speak so freely after a personal matter. He remembered her pregnancy as something not up for discussion or small talk. There wasn’t much she could do to hide the growth in her belly, so she took expert care in ignoring its consequence. The squad learned that lesson quickly, but Rollins was short with those who smiled a touch too wide or surveyed her growing figure like a building site. 

Barba reasoned much the same attitude would follow her finished product. The child didn’t grace the squad room but just the once, as if she felt she’d needed to bring proof of all her time off. 

“You don’t need to…”

“I can’t tell Carisi that. He wouldn’t get it.” Rollins studied Barba, still deciding whether or not he _did_ get it. She risked it, continuing, “Declan… the father. He wants to see her.” 

“Oh.” Barba blinked, then frowned. He leaned in and told her in no uncertain terms, “Whether you listed him as the birth father or not, his legal standing is shaky as a rickshaw. Where was he last, Serbia? Please. He’s got about as much legal precedent as a game of tag.”

Rollins raised an eyebrow at the implication, but knew it was Barba’s way of reassuring her, and only his silver tongue colored it strangely. 

“I wasn’t fishing for legal advice,” she said. “It’s not like that. And he wouldn’t, anyway. Or I’d kill him if he tried.” She waited a beat, but Barba didn’t have any thought for the law in that regard.

Or if he did, he was wise not to say. 

Rollins let her attention hang on a little golden-haired head across the room. 

“I kind of just want her all to myself, you know?”

“Not in so many words, no,” Barba said, because he certainly _hoped_ he wasn’t so juvenile as to deny Carisi’s desires for a family because he would rather they be a twosome, only. He _hoped_ he wasn’t so hungry for the man’s attention that he would sever all attempts to turn his eye. 

He hoped he didn’t want Carisi like that, didn’t _need_ him like that.

Rollins cut at eyes him.

“You _know.”_

She was daring him to object--within earshot of Carisi, no less. Barba couldn’t fault her curiosity--or her tactics, truth be told--so what he took issue with, then, was his own reticence to hear his answer given outright. 

He questioned its tone. 

“Perhaps,” he said. A meager allowance, and Rollins didn’t let him get away with thinking any different of it. 

“You ever think of putting that in a card, Romeo?” 

They were whispering, Barba realized. _Whispering._ He knew he’d lowered his tone, but he hadn’t been the first to _whisper._

Or, if he had, he wouldn’t say another word unless she did.

Rollins sipped her coffee. Black and bitter, it did the twin duties of waking her up and reminding her how tired she always felt. 

“All the same, one is enough.” 

_Goddamn,_ Barba thought. 

A murmur. Considerably less trifling than a whisper.

Neither spoke for a time, and because Barba couldn’t stand to tell her what he knew--couldn’t part with that part of himself, coiled and tender as it was--he did the next best thing. 

He asked what _she knew._

“Did you think this would last?” Barba could have kicked himself for fumbling the delivery, and took another sip of coffee, as if it was something stronger and could retroactively explain away his error. “Did Carisi? Ever… mention it?”

Barba made a face at his own incompetence. He asked questions for a living, the exercise no more alien to him than breathing. Yet every word now was a struggle, as asking towards his own interests offered little in the way of hypotheticals. 

Where was he speaking from, if not intimate experience?

Rollins said, “I think by the time any of us found out, it already had.” 

_Lasted,_ she meant. Months. Or who knew, really, when the idea took root, when they started feeling absent touches of the other well before Barba made quick work of having Carisi in his bed, of exploiting his care and concern when Barba could not yet claim to return it. 

Barba wondered how readily his thoughts were played across his face; if he looked worried for having invoked a timeframe, or if he thought he ought to be. 

“I suppose you wouldn’t ask Liv this kind of thing. Propriety, and all.” Rollins gave a sharp grin--the kind she grew up biting into in Georgia, sweet and sour as ripe fruit. They were all teeth, a touch insincere, and a brilliant sight. “Man, I bet it’s been eatin’ away at you…”

Barba was swift with a prim and proper dismissal of the whole concept. _“Thank you,_ Detective. Forget I asked.”

Rollins waved him off. 

“He’s head over heels for you. Obviously. Never had a bad thing to say even before you two got together.” 

“You say that like it’s some accomplishment,” Barba observed, and the idea that Carisi _should_ have held a few misgivings toward him because of the myriad of ways Barba dismissed, belittled, and ignored him early in their meeting stuck soundly in his mind. Had he not been mid-conversation, Barba would have quieted himself, considered it, and rendered a verdict. He shelved the matter instead; another niggling doubt to let fester. He had them in numbers fit to rival his record collection.

“He wants it to last,” Rollins said. Barba felt something deep in his chest tighten, and maybe that played out physically, too, because Rollins added quickly: “I don’t think I’m overstepping, saying so.” 

While Barba mulled over his words, chewing and digesting and regurgitating them, Rollins fiddled idly with the end of her ponytail and shrugged.

“I think he figures--I think we all do--that much is up to you.”

Barba raised an eyebrow. He’d asked for Rollins’ opinion, but struck paydirt, hearing more. 

“Sorry I missed the meeting.” 

“It was more of an informal polling,” Rollins returned with a twang that was all southern charm. 

Rollins didn’t admit her own, private truth: that it was obvious Carisi held a whole host of feelings for Barba--those of adoration, emulation, opportunity, and want--and that above all else, Barba wanted _that._ He wanted _those things_ Carisi carried for him; he wanted to be adored and respected, and--perhaps--Carisi was the first in a long time to come around with all those gifts spilling from his sleeves. 

She’d held her tongue--Carisi was grown enough to make his own mistakes, and _was it a mistake,_ really, if he got even just a taste of what he wanted? 

Ultimately, she came away feeling rewarded for her patience. There was far more from Barba’s end than she’d realized, and the man continued to reveal himself by degrees. Precautions to safeguard their careers were to be expected, but what Rollins hadn’t banked on was that Barba went great lengths to protect his own heart, because--good _God_ \--the man was a sap. 

In a hundred years, Rollins wouldn’t have pegged Barba for framing photos, standing up to take a potential blow to his career, or sentimental hat-wearing. Those things arrived slowly, but much to Carisi’s delight and Barba’s purported annoyance. 

Rollins was certain that wasn’t the case. 

Because Carisi wasn’t the kind of person one could be with lightly. The man came rolling up to a professional relationship with a box of cannoli and a story about his great-great aunt, and half his family tree, besides. The things he must have said when sniffing out something more… 

In her lesser moments, Rollins had entertained the notion, figuring that Carisi would have been receptive to any offers made. Because he was sweet, and she liked that--on occasion. 

She wondered if he would have given voice to his sexuality sooner, had she dared to extend the invitation, or if he’d have well and truly tried to date her just to see the lie through another day. 

Sadly, Rollins didn’t think that was so outside the realm of possibility. Such was her understanding: Carisi did not claim to have previous boyfriends, yet ex-girlfriends abounded, and though they passed mention without so much as a name, Rollins believed they stood right alongside him in reality. After all, Carisi had happened upon a Coney Island whitefish in the wilds of New York and didn’t so much as blink; there was a wealth of experience, even if the draw was empty, and nothing but for show. And the boy had been in a _state_ when first faced with the notion of himself--his whole self--reflected in the eyes of others. 

Rollins was of many minds to his admission. How could someone deny themselves so ardently for so long, yet make as clean a break as he apparently had, and with _Barba_ of all people? A man who made a career of examining those fault lines and breaks, was ruthless when he took an audience with them, and used his words to punish? Where was all the mess, the broken pieces? 

Rollins couldn’t imagine Barba taking a knee and sweeping them up.

She realized he must surely see her looking lost in thought, and bid a hasty retreat back towards the strange table they’d set: a brand of honesty propped up by a singular sense that it was for Carisi’s benefit. 

“Obviously, it’s something,” Rollins recovered. “A _year_ is something. Something real special, even.”

“Well done me,” Barba said, snideness ever being his friend. He paused, considered her words, and considered that it was _her_ saying them. Barba leaned back in his chair, fixing an elbow on the armrest and slowly letting his arm cover its length, drink poised at the end. It was something of a slinky powermove, he was loathe to admit. 

“That’s awfully sentimental,” he said.

“You want crass and heavy-handed?” Rollins asked, thinking, _You want Carisi?_ “I don’t think our man has a mind to hit it and quit it, Counselor. All due respect.” 

“I’ll forget you said that.” Barba now felt more smarted than powerful, but he showed nary a moment of hesitation or doubt. “It being Christmas, and all. Miracles, you know.”

From the living room, where he sat with Jesse in his lap, playing with wrapping and bows from the gifts, Carisi looked up, craned his head to see the pair over the obstruction of Rollins’ couch, and frowned. 

“It’s Christmas over here,” he reminded them. “Tiny tots, eyes all aglow, the whole nine yards. In case you forgot.”

“I tagged out. You can handle her for a while longer, huh?” Rollins teased, rolling her shoulders and making an opulent display of luxury as she drank her coffee and ate from the tin of cookies Carisi had brought. 

Carisi served an expectant look to Barba, who met it with some offense. 

“I carried all that food up four flights of stairs. I’ve done my part.”

Carisi huffed, but his attention returned to Jesse with a sweetness that belied any hard feelings. He kissed the top of her head and drew in the crinkled ball of paper she was reaching for. As Barba watched the quiet little scene, he did not wonder how it was that Carisi should be a mass of sharp limbs and still be graceful and tender--he’d had experience enough to know how Carisi managed that particular feat. 

His mind chased only the possibility of other people Carisi might have, romantic or otherwise, who he held in that way. He turned those thoughts away as quickly as they found him; he didn’t have competition.

“Are you pleased with yourself? You look it.”

Barba gave Rollins a strange look out from under his furrowed brow; his deep-set eyes shone brightly from their inherently dark setting. “Do I?”

“You look happy.”

“I am in open revolt to the very concept.” 

“Funny you’d say so, considering who you’ve shacked up with.” Rollins smirked like she thought it was cute that Barba might play coy, as if he thought he could hide _anything_ being with a man such as Carisi, as if their mere proximity told her everything she needed to know. 

“A genuinely happy person? I’d have thought that’d grate on your nerves.” 

If that estimation were true of Carisi, Barba would be inclined agree. But the man had more depth than he cared to show, and dwelling therein were dark truths and muffled secrets. A tug-of-war waged on between Carisi’s heart and his immortal soul, and in ways Barba was only beginning to see, both seemed to stand resolutely against the other.

It was disheartening to see Carisi in pain, no matter how well he kept it hidden. 

All the same, Barba wondered if he could love someone with no awful realities to inform their lives. He feared being seen as a miser for his own tendencies there, but he knew a worse fate: being an excitable fool, his constitution weakened by inexperience, his choices made at random, his heart open to all. He’d found enough trouble in life, exerting caution when he did--but if he hadn’t the wherewithal to apply good sense? In a world where every good thing was bartered for, met with harsh terms, and paid profusely with staggering dues? Barba was certain he’d be long dead, or worse--unaccomplished. 

Happiness was dangerous territory. Some small part of Barba was relieved Carisi didn’t revel in it. 

The morning wore on with Barba easing enough into his company that he could forgive himself the intrusion of his own self into the mix. For as well as Rollins and Carisi fit together as friends, as goofy as their jokes and taut as their ribbing of one another, Barba’s critical eye found Carisi’s own drawing back to him. Every cackle of laughter or wheezing, undignified delight was something Carisi immediately sought to share with his lover. 

His eyes were bright and his smile wide until it shrank from wild to soft, small, and inherently kissable. In that respect, Barba would have preferred some follow-through, but Christmas morning at a colleague’s apartment was neither the time nor the place. 

Jesse napped as Carisi began preparing _yet another_ meal--something fresh and hearty to leave Rollins with, since _(apparently)_ the elaborately crafted side dishes wouldn’t do. Rollins put up a bigger protest than Barba, saying they’d already done too much, and Carisi already had carte blanche for covered shifts. But Carisi wouldn't take no for an answer, so Barba and Rollins made the most of the situation, and moved surreptitiously from coffee to wine. 

There was a silent consensus made around the tiny blue card table: Carisi preparing a meal was a welcome sight, and neither Barba nor Rollins made like they didn’t enjoy watching. 

“Rollins, you don’t have red?”

Carisi twisted around to face her after a quick search of her kitchen cabinets came up empty. 

“Fresh out. We’ve got… half a box of white.”

“I need red for the marinara,” Carisi said, looking personally offended for her sorry idea of a quick-fix. He brightened and started for the door. “Bodega around the block was open. I’ll be back in ten.”

The kiss he pressed to Barba’s cheek was as chaste and wholesome a thing Rollins had seen in some time, and by that virtue alone, she felt a little strange to be witnessing it. But Carisi didn’t falter a single step, and his ease was met automatically by Barba’s own. Barba, who forgot himself for all of a second, made himself host to a warmth that rose to color his features. The picture they made appeared both strikingly vibrant and peaceably untouched--though, Rollins supposed that was happiness personified. She felt much the same with Jesse: unbelieveable terror and worry marked with just enough wonder and heartache to constitute life’s narrowest turns: from certain ruin to unmistakeable miracle. 

_That_ was happiness: a steady stream of tragedy with one left turn. 

Rollins nodded after Carisi, and downed the rest of her drink once he’d gone, apartment door closed behind him and the rustle of tugging on his shoes absent from earshot. Her attention was on Barba like a shot, and he frowned, wary for its intensity. 

“Okay, now that I’ve had a few--” She grinned, wiley and satisfied. “You really like him, don’t you?” 

Barba met her with a sideways smile just this side of a smirk--the one he wore in near-perpetuity, that went handsomely with every stripe, polka-dot, or print in his wardrobe. It was a look he’d spent the morning trying to muster up, to cover his feelings of unease for the kind of social situation he’d put himself in. 

And with that simple gesture, his confidence came roaring back.

“That’s what you need to drink to justify asking?” Barba was genuinely curious. They had a year on the books--surely time was as good a marker as any, and implied all the rest?

“I want to hear you say it.”

It was the wine that made her sound more treacherous than teasing, the wine that made Barba answer her regardless. 

“Yes. I really do.” Without meaning to, Barba heard himself match her intensity with coolness. Disinterest, even. 

Or worse, disdain. 

He didn't want to _gab._ He was a gossip by any measure, but he did not willfully give of himself to others in his own words. Any impression was theirs to compose by his deeds, and whatever it was they believed compelled his doing them. Some wrote off all his grandstanding as a desire for the limelight, others saw a man trying to do good, achieve justice. Most saw a man ever-driven to prove himself with a cutthroat attitude to match the intensity of his caseload. 

And then again, some saw him as tired and heartbroken, living his life in the pits of others’ deepest despair. 

Others still-- _Alex Munoz_ \--held a press conference just to call him a coward and a lapdog, fueled by jealousy and malice.

Glimmers of truth shone through every version of himself amassed by others. Barba wouldn’t break a sweat denying any of them.

But he could not opt for reticence when he wore the smile he did, while drinking wine from a coffee mug at the kitchen table of a work colleague on Christmas morning. 

“I’ll do you one better,” he continued, “And stave off any alcohol poisoning: we are past dating. We’re together. He’s no less absurd than he’s ever been, though my tolerance for that is apparently limitless.” Barba squared his shoulders, and offered what was perhaps his most damning piece of sentimentality to date: “He’s my friend.”

“He wasn’t that before? Ever?”

“No,” Barba answered at once. It wasn’t that Carisi wasn’t friend _ly_ \--he was well and truly that, even overly so. Barba might have offhandedly thought him a friend, then, but not now. In retrospect, Barba had hardly known a thing about Carisi beyond his obvious adoration when he started sleeping with him. 

But Rollins didn’t need to know that.

“There,” he added--a bit of needless verbal punctuation. “You get all that on the house.”

Rollins waggled her eyebrows. “Is this line of questioning making you nervous, Counselor?”

Barba spelled it out, his honest take on the matter: “You're asking after my intentions towards your partner. I’d be a two-time idiot not to tread lightly.”

There was nothing soft or sorry in his voice, nothing meek. He wasn't trying to invoke pity, but Rollins felt it all the same. Sadly, she supposed Barba _would_ think there was a lesson to be learned for going after cops from the 27th. Though she didn't peg Barba for unsettled enough--or _unhinged_ \--to think she’d set out to harm him, or that breaking hearts merits retaliation, she took him at his word.

He’d always been good with those, after all.

“I’m only teasing.”

Barba looked uninterested; goodwill did not so easily penetrate that blue wall. 

He sipped his wine, Rollins hers. Between them, Frannie nosed around and the collapsed on the floor in an excitable huff. She rolled, and Rollins’ hand was there to instinctively scratch her belly. Barba considered chewing through the silence just like this, waiting it out until Carisi returned and the occasion for still more questions was lost. 

Squandering opportunities wasn’t in Barba’s nature. 

“He talks to you, doesn’t he? He talks to--someone?”

And now it was Rollins’ turn to tread carefully. She didn’t intend on betraying a confidence.

“Yeah. We talk.”

Barba didn't hear the non-answer she angled for; the trajectory was all wrong, and care and consideration entered the equation all the same.

“I don’t suppose I could count on you to lower his expectations?”

Rollins’ eyes widened, then set. Barba closed his and felt a lightness--the first gasps of laughter--balloon in his gut.

“Let me explain--”

“Yeah, I think you should.”

“He’s not some total novice in this, or, well--he can tell you about his girlfriend…” Barba searched for the word, “...era. He expects this to be different, somehow. Better, even if he changed nothing else.”

If Barba thought he’d gone too personal, Rollins took that concern and hurled it farther still. 

“Well, I can think of one thing he’s been lacking for.”

Barba could all but hear the kicker: a game show host esque _hey-oh!_

But he didn’t shock easy; this much Rollins knew, so she expected--and delighted in--Barba’s ready reply.

“If he talked to you about _that,_ I wouldn’t think you could look me in the eye.” 

Rollins gave a sideways smile, pleased that Barba didn't fluster or startle. His coolness gave her permission to be warm, to offset the scene composed of his sharp posturing and her professed ease.

“I think he just wants to want you.”

She shared this simple notion in a tone of voice that sooner meant, _You're in it now, buddy._

Then, with an offhand air she continued: “I’m just saying, if he’s really into men, then dating you is going to blow everyone else out of the water… kinda by default.”

Barba’s eyes fixed on hers, and Rollins was startled by their intensity. 

“If?”

“Only,” Rollins revised, and to her credit looked embarrassed for the error. “If he is into men… only.” 

Even that didn’t sit entirely well with Barba who, despite those being his terms, could not entertain options to what Carisi had told him, to who Carisi _was._

Barba spared both himself and Rollins a misplaced show of sanctimonious anger on Carisi’s behalf. He knew Carisi considered her a friend, despite her rough edges. Carisi had those of his own in spades, whereas Barba had blunted his, wearing them down over decades so that nothing caught on him. Everything bruised, but nothing stuck. 

Barba had always found that so long as he did not appear hurt, the effort buzzed around the room until it found a home. 

To wit, Rollins winced through her thinking: “It was a _long time_ he spent convinced otherwise.”

“Convinced being the operative word.” Barba sounded more clipped than he liked, and more defensive for a fault that was not his own. But he couldn't help himself; he’d heard Carisi’s muted telling of his confession of feeling so morally bankrupt, he was driven to such distraction that he’d sooner accept derision and meet it as kindness.

“There was a higher power involved. I’m sure you can sympathize.”

“Because I was raised Baptist? I think you know me well enough to guess none of it took.”

She’d given him an excuse, and in the seconds it took to run his mouth off the rails, Barba would regret not taking it. 

“Because you’re a woman in this country, born with the misfortune of a pretty face, and subject to other people’s unwanted interpretation of that fact.”

The implication was clear, the imposition massive. Hearing it from himself, Barba could have bitten his own tongue clean off. Even in a roundabout way, they’d never again spoken of Rollins’ ordeal with Deputy Chief Patton, not since she’d run through the facts with him. Usually a piece of trial prep so daunting would necessitate two or three run-throughs, but not hers--Barba knew the whole sordid thing in one go. 

He was certain, too, that even in moments of utter peace and tranquility, Rollins was never lacking for details. 

So Barba wanted to collect the words from the air itself, to gather, crush, and dispose of them. He could do no such thing; his only choice was to ratify those words with still more. To offer an explanation _for_ his explanation, however, was beyond useless, and more akin to an insult. Rollins, characterized as a young, blonde, _ambitious_ underling--same as all Patton’s victims--had the ultimate understanding of others foisting on her their ideals for her beauty, and thinking her ruined for the outcome. There was nothing for Barba to tell her that she did not intimately know herself.

She looked at him, expression sharp but not hurt. She felt a mask draw over her face, that strange, imperceptible one she believed every woman wore on a chain around their necks, just to carry it close. It was a look that crawled up throats and clung to hairlines. _Widows peaks,_ Rollins had thought as a child, belonged to those most affronted. That mask had one hell of a grip, and some women wore them without reprieve. 

The lack of surprise in her expression pained Barba more than he could say. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Barba said this quietly, getting it out before Rollins had tongue and teeth around her own response. He may not have been wrong, but that was beside the point. His reading of her life was shallow at worst, and unnecessary at best. 

Barba leaned back in his chair, and Rollins wondered if he thought she looked like she wanted to hit him. That--moreso than the actual apology--took the air out of her sails, leaving her feeling spent and frayed, as if she’d given him the earful he’d only imagined being audience to. 

He sighed. 

What came next was more an admission than an explanation. Barba knew Rollins would hear the difference.

“There’s just been… a line of that conversation through his family.” 

She smirked, something slight and just for show. It was clear Barba was ceding this private information, handing it over like he hoped to win her favor. “What, the patriarchy?”

Barba closed his tired eyes, and each found a sorry kind of comfort in the respective dullness there: Barba, in the darkness, and Rollins, looking upon a man emptied of his secrets. 

“The power of convictions,” he said. “And--anyway. You’ve seen him delude himself through worse. That mustache?”

Rollins grinned wide, a thing big enough and bright enough to shine through any mask.

“That _mustache._ ” 

Rollins felt sympathy for Carisi. She knew that game, played it better than a hand in poker. Jesse helped her forget. A child was a far greater gamble than any she’d made in backrooms, and greater still than the risks she took every day to do her job. 

But in retrospect, Rollins knew she still had a taste for playing the odds, indulging in chance enough to manifest opportunities from dead air. Even after seeing the picture of Carisi and Barba vacationing in Boston, she might have considered an excuse, had he deigned to give one. 

Carisi’s swift return--wine brandished eagerly in one hand--brought an end to Rollins’ and Barba’s conversation, though neither put their thoughts too far away. Both promptly smiled for him when he entered, as if they'd spent the entire ten minutes waiting only to do so. 

Conversation spilled down old and trusted routes; work and life, or however the two were split. It came to a head with only Carisi and Rollins, with Barba listening comfortably and smiling after their rapport. Carisi mentioned to Rollins he hadn’t been keeping up with the trashy reality shows they used to watch together, and she teased him with a few salacious details.

“See what you miss when you binge on _Antiques Roadshow?”_

Barba raised an eyebrow. “Is that what you call me?”

“No!” Carisi squawked, taken by Barba’s stealthy return to the conversation. “You just… we watch a lot of PBS.” 

Barba opened his mouth to object--what constituted _a lot,_ really, in terms of quality programming?--but found himself drawn to his phone, glowing and chiming with a call from his mother. 

He shot Carisi a smart look to tide him over, then set about tackling the call. 

“Mami, hi. Merry Christmas.” 

Barba stood up from the table and moved to deposit his empty coffee-turned-wine mug into the sink. It didn’t get him far enough away to merit any privacy, but he didn’t expect to be needing it. 

“...Here with Sonny, our colleague Amanda y ... su bebé.” Barba waited a beat, hearing out his mother as she asked after the child’s name before answering stiffly, “Bebé.”

“Her name’s Jesse!” Rollins said, amusement coloring her voice, and Barba was reminded not only why Carisi liked her, but why he did, too.

_“Jesse.”_

Over the phone, Lucia pressed, _“I thought you two would--”_

Barba cut her off: “I know.”

Lucia was not deterred. 

_“With his family, mijo. Wasn’t that the plan? His plan?”_

“Not this year.” Barba, still aware of his present audience, tried to sound as chipper as he ought to be, given he’d won that particular battle. Only Carisi had taken shrapnel in the cold war with his family. 

He wandered a bit from the kitchen, uncertain in how long this conversation would be--in some ways, how long he could stand it and how long he make it.

“How’s Miami? Everyone?”

_“They miss you.”_

Lucia’s response was fast and seemingly uncomplicated. Barba gave a soft snort of derision, and Carisi, mistakenly believing himself to the topic of conversation, glanced at him from the table, looking like he thought to step in if necessary, to offer an explanation he still didn't quite accept. Barba plastered a soft smile on his face to dissuade Carisi of the thought. It was a mismatched feature coupled with the cool edge cutting diagonally through his voice. 

“I’m sure I'm in _great_ demand.”

_“Really,”_ she insisted, and Barba was taken now with her insistence. When she played him, she'd always taken care not to sound so damn sincere. 

_“Things have changed. They’ve seen you, read your words in the paper. They know your courage.”_

Barba didn't understand half the words coming out of her mouth. He made a few mental leaps with the tone, at least: his mother was obviously pleased with this supposed development. She probably thought stoking Barba’s ego with a little goodwill from his family would draw her son back in, make it easier for him to risk his pride again.

And, truly, Barba was a little touched. Surprised, moreso, that they followed his case at all, and read the words he’d used to achieve his own justice.

Or cared whether he lived or died, even.

(Morbidity went hand in hand with the holiday season, Barba thought, so he did not chastise himself for indulging.)

“Oh?” Barba tried for aloof, and woefully missed the mark. 

_“Ramón wants to speak with you. He’s gesturing for the phone, now.”_

“Mami…”

Carisi, as if he knew it was good news by the uneasy look on Barba’s face, encouraged him to take the call onwards. Likewise, Rollins wirelessly offered her bedroom for privacy, and Barba stepped inside, not feeling particularly intrusive because Rollins certainly didn't make him feel that way, and her bedroom was little more than an extension of the living room: littered with Jesse’s things, baby-proofed inasmuch as there wasn’t a corner gone undraped with muslin swaddle blankets or burp cloths. 

Frannie, ever the protector, nosed her way through the door and followed Barba inside.   
The space was small and untidy, with a partially made bed and a corner hamper full of clothes. There wasn't space for much besides a tiny dresser and a nightstand, but Barba wasn’t looking to pace. He’d already gone circles around a memory of a man who once threw a punch at his abuelita’s birthday party, a man who had taken one from Barba in return, who’d followed Barba out of the building and into the street when, humiliated, Barba abandoned the festivities. 

His jaw ached at the memory, and Barba readied himself to end the call at a moment’s notice.

He hadn’t spoken to this man in _years._

“Hello?”

-

Even from Rollins’ room, Barba could smell the finished product of Carisi’s efforts in the kitchen--his cooking had the benefit of announcing itself, spices and aromas perfuming over all. It sent Frannie packing, for one. She used Barba’s lap as a jumping-off-point, springing into action and gliding through the door in search of handouts from an easy mark. 

_Carisi,_ no doubt.

Barba stayed, too full and satisfied already with only conversation. 

Ramón was just the start. For an hour, Barba was passed around to cousins Federico, Eva, Nilo, and Gabriel, and felt so enveloped in the atmosphere bleeding through the phone that he caught himself wondering why no one had offered him a drink.

These were people he hadn’t spoken to in years, people who had taken his father’s word as to Barba’s being, but in the patriarch’s absence let their views soften and fade. Now they asked, now they _wanted to know:_ who was this man they’d read about? Removed by time and genuine distance, but still easily recognizable in that nose, those green eyes. 

Their grudges were borrowed, and therefore nothing as formidable--as _earned_ \--as Barba’s. And the sentiment held at the forefront of Barba’s mind, even as he found himself enjoying the joyful talk, the rapid fire, sun-soaked Spanish: these people only _believed_ they’d disliked Barba, yet Barba had been actively disliked. 

But each came ready with a curiosity that discredited those long-lost pangs of animosity. They’d heard so much, things well beyond news of the assassination attempt, and all the subsequent hot takes and think pieces about the state of the NYPD. His name got out there, and it stuck. Barba first believed it to be mere public intrigue: he was the would-be victim of a would-be firing squad. The imagery alone captured imaginations, fed that niggling desire people had for a fate for than death: demise, certain or otherwise. 

His bizarre brand of media familiarity was a product, Barba knew, of both favoritism and laziness. Before the incident, he could be counted on for a sharp couple of lines, a great picture, a few no-nonsense comments on cases. Afterwards, his assault became a handy kind of byline, a tantalizingly lurid detail about the man who cheated death taking on cases where oftentimes the victim wasn’t so lucky. Those details tethered him to reality, and made a neat chain of gruesome acts for the newspaper-reading, subway-riding fare to follow along their morning commutes. 

Now, his name carried its own weight, and the identifier--like _Cuban_ had been at the start of his career, amid the extravagant lobbies of top-level firms in the City--was lost, cleared to make more space for his work. 

Speaking to his family felt like seeing his name in the paper. He’d gone past _disrespectful_ and _ungrateful._ Past _faggot._ Past every foul word his father put ahead of his reputation, past the imagined shame that took Barba all the way to Cambridge-- _as far from Cuba as a man could go,_ as was sneered of him. 

All that talk had died with his father, but the damage was done long before the instigator was silenced. Barba hadn’t known--couldn’t know--the opportunity he’d wasted, holding a grudge with a dead man’s words. 

Because as it happened, Barba found he liked these people--his cousins, though the term was loose the way Lucia used it. They were a long way from home, and Barba couldn’t blame her for inflating their ranks. 

He hadn’t realized how long he’d been talking until he heard nothing. Silence. The whole apartment was quiet, save for Barba’s own voice, and those tinny accents holding close to his ear. He ended his conversations, again wished his mother a Merry Christmas, and--very quietly--thanked her. 

“I love you,” she said--a final word Barba very nearly missed, ending the call when he did. They didn’t say that to one another, didn’t make pronouncements so easily, especially those that wielded such power, withheld or not. So Barba was left stunned, downright astonished by its use. When had she last sounded so fulfilled and pleased? When he’d taken her name? Graduated from Harvard? 

Taken the stand?

Those held out as true honors, and instances where the words were delivered as their own entire sentiment, and not tacked on to some tertiary effort. But _I love you,_ for speaking with distant relatives on the phone?

Barba scrubbed a hand over his face, then swept it back through his hair in search of his composure. 

How long had his mother held out hope that he’d make allowances for his family again? And why had he never given a second thought to denying her that? 

Barba stepped out of the bedroom and saw Carisi and Rollins sat on the couch. Rollins’ head was drooped and resting on Carisi’s shoulder, and baby Jesse was similarly open-mouthed, asleep with her head just under Carisi’s chin. Ahead of them, a muted version of _How the Grinch Stole Christmas_ was playing on television. 

“Hey,” Carisi whispered. Barba fought the inclination to shake his head, to stifle conversation on the off-chance it wouldn’t remain private. Carisi implored him to sit, to join the perfect little picture made by himself, Rollins, and Jesse. Barba eased himself down on the arm of the couch, not one to freely choose sitting next to an infant, even if the arm that held her--Carisi’s arm, steady and sure--was a fine enough buffer. 

Carisi raised a hand to gently cup against Jesse’s head, covering her ear. 

“You were talking to your family, right? Everyone with your mom in Miami?”

“Yes,” Barba replied, and _again_ found whispering to be a strange exercise. There was a time and place for the act, and as far as Barba had learned, that was in his bed at three in the morning. Yet Carisi seemed to fall into it like a second language.

All those years of going to Mass, Barba supposed, had to pay off in some useful way.

_“And?”_

“It went… very well. Great, actually.” Barba spared a glance at Rollins and--as an afterthought--Jesse. Both were still sound asleep. “Like I’d never spoken to these people before.” 

Carisi smiled broadly. It was, in a way, much too loud for all the hushed speaking that surrounded it. He adjusted Jesse in his arms, and as he moved her tiny hand shot out to grip at empty air over his shoulder. She was searching for the hallmarks of her mother: long hair and an innate sense of space. Safe as she felt, Jesse knew Rollins had to be near. 

But it was only Carisi. Drool-on-his-palladian-blue-shirt-Carisi. 

“So, Christmas in Miami next year?” 

Barba shook his head; he couldn’t say the idea didn’t strike him well, but it was just as much a fantasy as this--Carisi sat with a child in his arms, the trappings of Christmas littered across the floor, bows and paper and toys, grudgingly bought and hastily wrapped on the singular notion gnawing at Barba’s heart: that all those family traditions Carisi so cherished had devolved to this, to makeshift efforts and a reliance on friends with similarly broken visions.

So Barba didn’t want to boast--in part to spare Carisi’s ego, but mostly because he wasn’t confident on the high ground from which he’d sing his own praises. He didn’t know what good it might do to reconnect with family, if their attitudes had changed such that they were more genuine now than before, or if it wasn’t just that he preferred what they had to say, now. 

Suspicion and doubt ran through him like electric currents, charging his blood and searing his skin. Barba schooled both those nervous energies, and indulged himself just staring at Carisi, watching joy smooth the lines in his brow and soften his smile into pinkened grace. 

Barba moved a hand to sweep through Carisi’s hair, fixing an imagined cowlick. 

He knew he was witnessing the payoff of all the cooking, excitement, and expectations Carisi had occupied himself with in recent days. Carisi looked so satisfied with the result that Barba had to look around in search of evidence. 

To his surprise, he found heaps of it.

Carisi was endlessly welcome--and what a turnaround that was. Barba was struck by a spectre of the past: a vision of Carisi, all hunched shoulders, darting eyes, and mustache lying like a fat worm under the bird’s beak of his nose. He was wholly uncomfortable in that semblance of himself, and human nature itself dictated that Barba look away.

In fact, he’d hardly paid the man any mind back when Carisi was deep into his boisterous rookie cop routine; Barba had known hundreds of those types across all the boroughs in the City, and none made so much as a passing impression. But then came the heartfelt arguments, studied legal theory, and plays for intellectual affirmation that Barba so loved to deny him. 

The _faces_ Carisi made. 

Barba delighted in the little gasps of ruin just as well as the glowing moments of satisfaction; both surprised him for being totally genuine. And Rollins was once just as overt with her annoyance--perhaps moreso. As far as coming around went, Barba was far and away the winner, but now--trusting her child in Carisi’s arms, certain of his judgement? Rollins had made tremendous headway. 

Barba could look around the room and know: Carisi was beloved. 

It wasn't pride that followed that sentiment; nothing wholesome inside Carisi was Barba’s doing. But he did feel a deep sense of satisfaction that penetrated him, ripped apart flesh and muscle and bone to arrive resoundingly at his heart. It was a painful delivery system for so tender a cause. Barba didn't question it. He felt the full range of its influence and was glad.

-

“Hey…”

At the time of Carisi’s and Barba’s departure, Rollins started into a last ditch effort with Barba’s coat in hand, and an expression on her face near enough to contrition to give Barba pause. She was reaching out towards an apology, or some semblance of words to repair damage from the barbs they’d traded earlier. Barba, not wanting to be caught by Carisi in the middle of such an exchange, only nodded and held her same brand of unease in his eyes until they were a matching set. 

She understood that he understood, and she smiled.

“Thanks for coming by,” was what she finished with. And, “Good company all around.” 

Her sentiments were short and sweet, and pinched in the middle as Carisi stole her away into yet another hug.

Barba and Carisi stepped out of the apartment and into a warm, humming silence, the kind best met after a satisfying meal. Because Carisi was that: full, finally, for what had starved him. An abundance of family, the simple delight of their company--these things sustained him. 

Carisi slung an arm across Barba’s shoulders when they started for the stairwell, a grip that was both firm and tender. Barba felt as though he was being braced for a great fall, but under Carisi’s hold, Barba found he didn’t mind the prospect at all. 

A kiss strung its way from Barba’s cheek to his mouth. It lingered, playing over nervous laughter and wry teasing as Carisi held Barba at bay in the stairwell. By its end, Barba was straightening his shirtfront and Carisi was smiling sheepishly for one of Rollins’ neighbors. 

Outside, traffic had picked up. All around the City, families were splitting apart, their holiday responsibilities met and departed from, like every hasty hug to a distant uncle. Spilling onto the sidewalks and searching for taxis were the outcasts, the hanger-ons. They were single people and couples alike, halving their time like a child of divorce, making appearances at--and performing in deference to--others’ traditions before shuffling back into their own lives, absent any returns. 

Mass was letting out, too. Barba spared a thought for how early he’d had that glass of wine, but remembered how unbearably _long_ Mass had felt as a kid, knew none among the parishioners themselves had an parched throat, and called it even. 

Barba wondered if there might be faces in the crowds of good Catholics Carisi might recognize, people who knew him by the reputation set by his mother and family name out on Staten Island. The Catholic faith was hardly so intimate a club, after all. 

If these concerns met Barba, they rode high and clear of Carisi’s head. They’d taken two steps off the stoop to Rollins’ building when Carisi’s hand found Barba’s, fast like he’d been waiting on it. He gripped with intent, and moved in close. 

“Tell me about them,” Carisi prompted, all untenable excitement. “Your family.”

Barba opened his mouth--he _wanted to,_ and there was much to say--but the words didn’t come. He supposed the fact that he had heard more from his family today than Carisi had of his own had something to do with it. He was able to temper his excitement, small and precious as it was, like a tiny pearl in the palm of his hand. It was an absurd thing to find had appeared in his possession, and for lack of an explanation, he saw cause only to hold it tight. 

He was afraid, too, of giving it away as quickly as he found it, of saying all there was to say about himself, including his sudden hope for reconciliation despite all the performative posturing to the contrary. 

What would Carisi think of him, now? Would he demand the same tenderness of heart for his own family’s misgivings?

How much could Barba be expected to extend of himself, olive branch and hand and all, when he still believed it could be lopped off at the wrist?

“It was--a lot. I don’t know what to make of it all just yet.” 

That much, at least, was true. 

“It’s great,” Carisi said, emphatic. “I’m glad.”

Barba was inclined to believe him. 

As they walked the short distance to the car, Carisi’s hand left Barba’s and lingered in the crook of his elbow, instead. He liked the look of them like that, hand seen their reflection once in a building’s window and felt weak with delight. Privately, he had to admit Barba’s elbow was a nearer thing than his hand, so Carisi could grasp it and walk tall rather than dipping slightly, as if together they meant to carry a cement block between them. 

Better still, the effort brought Barba closer to him, touching their shoulders and sides. When it came to quantity and quality, Carisi thought intimacy went both ways. 

“Did Rollins say something to you?” Carisi asked. Proximity lent him that, too: a better sense of his partner, as aired through the stiffness of his stride, the taut shoulders. “You seemed upset when I got back.” 

“No.”

“No, she didn’t say anything, or no, you’re lying about being upset?”

Barba rolled his eyes. “Interrogation tactics, really?” Carisi didn’t answer him--another ploy, well-developed through use. “She said something to the effect of, people think we’re together up and until I lose interest.”

Carisi stopped. His arm slipped from his comfortable place along Barba’s and went slack at his side.

“Why would she say that?”

“I asked,” Barba answered, simply, unabashedly. If there was any surprise at her answers, or hurt, he’d left it in the moment. Now, he only carried a few facts in lieu of resentments. “Thought I’d put my assumptions to rest.” 

“No, you wanted to feed your own paranoia, which, as you know, isn’t a good look for you.” 

Barba clocked Carisi’s attempt to _shame_ the shame out of him, but kept his composure. 

“You don’t think it’s worthwhile, taking a view of yourself outside your own biases and sympathies?”

_“If_ I thought that was what you were doing, sure. But, Raf, you’re just looking for reasons to doubt yourself.”

_There was that word again,_ Barba thought bitterly. 

But unlike what unraveled between Barba and Rollins over coffee, wine, and Italian Christmas cookies, there was no implication in Carisi’s words, only the bald-faced truth. The ease with which Carisi unearthed it unsettled Barba deeply. 

Because he must have liked what he saw, despite the routinely ugly readings of Barba’s intentions and motivations. He stayed, after all. Asked to stay, even, and with such gravity and purpose Barba was slowly unleashing his imagined worth, inflating it right alongside Carisi’s grandiose estimates. 

Barba brought himself back down to earth with one question: How long could one man see a shallow figure and still ache to delve that much further into him?

Barba… could understand the impulse, to a point. He’d been enthralled by men and women alike, terrible people but interesting, or charming, or imposing. But of course he’d gone in with his eyes open.

Of course, he hadn’t stayed with any of them. 

He hadn’t _loved_ any of them. 

“You just want to railroad me.” He said this coolly, hoping Carisi would take it for a calcified end and forget the conversation. 

“Call it a euphemism and I’m there.”

“It already is.”

“A better one. For my nefarious purposes.” 

To wit, Carisi sank the hand he’d set on Barba’s elbow clear to his ass, and squeezed shamelessly. Barba did not so much as miss a beat, but his demeanor cooled considerably, and for the weather that was no small feat. 

“Nothing says Christmas quite like public molestation.” 

Carisi dropped a step back, first raising his hand to rest on Barba’s hip before abandoning their embrace entirely. He held the offending hand open and high, like he’d been burned, and the heat from his own breath might be enough to set it aflame again, so out into the cold air it went.

He watched as Barba’s shoulders tensed, then relaxed, as though he was shocked to remember how starkly absence felt, how profoundly it affected the flesh as well as the heart. At once, Carisi wanted to again lay a hand--even an unsolicited one--on Barba’s shoulder, his elbow, his _cheek,_ simply to convey the promise of his own wilful presence. 

But just off the tip of his index finger, and the length of a New York City street besides, was a familiar face. Carisi went still as death, committing to the vision so much as to draw back in the last breath he’d let prattle free. He drew it in greedily, like the sacrament he had not taken that morning. 

Barba, who had arrived at his parked car only to realize Carisi wasn’t ever-present on his heels, stared and recognized that look, but thought the application absurd. Still, he let his tone climb airily as he looked in the direction Carisi had clocked and posited, “A discarded lover?”

Carisi balked.

“No, it’s _Dan._ ” 

“Oh,” Barba said, realizing at once that he’d only been teasing. He took a second look at the Church and its emptying revellers, searching for a face he surely did not know, but thought--somehow--he’d recognize. 

Men who had tasted Sonny Carisi; they were but a small and disparate folk. 

“Please don’t look,” Carisi pleaded. The hand that had just been on Barba’s ass was now shielding his brow with such determination, Barba would have thought the sun had exploded and sent rays of burning light crashing down onto earth. 

_“Of course I’m going to look,”_ Barba answered back snippily, but his manhunt for Carisi’s one-off dance partner was in vain. Young, handsome, the kind of spit-shine, God-fearing, Staten Island boy to bring home to Ma--these were the things Barba knew to find, but the reality was this, and near unfaceable: he was looking for his would-be replacement. 

In a huff, Barba accused of Carisi, “You realize you’re making me look, now. Just tell me--”

“Grey jacket, red hat.”

Barba spotted him at once: a young man, slack-jawed when he spoke, smile drawn in permanent marker across his face, a laugh that pitted him forward and surely made him wheeze.   
Not so tall, not so fit. Not particularly well-dressed or captivating. 

_That’s all?_ Barba thought, first with satisfaction, then in abject misery. _That’s all._

_That’s **terrifying.**_

Barba imagined this was how a feudal king must have felt seeing the peasant hordes leading a rebellion. All that fuss for this?

Cold air whipped at his face. Across the street, he saw others tug their coats a little tighter, reacting in a way Barba did not, because the chill he was feeling was a distant second to the burn. 

“Well we can’t all be winners,” he said, the words dropping hard enough to impress cracks into the sidewalk. He sank into the car, taking the driver’s seat as usual. Carisi hurried just the same, like he did not wish to expose himself any further. He kept his head low, and only _just_ refrained from ducking for cover. 

“You want to put your head down, I can think of a nifty purpose.” 

Barba did the petty thing and pulled up right next to the church, putting Carisi’s passenger side closer to the scene outside the church. 

Barba would never admit to heartbreak, but when Carisi peeked an eye open to scout the man out of the crowd, he may have registered a few cracks. 

“Do you want to say hello?” Barba asked, but his perturbed tone and Carisi’s harried _what the fuck **no** I want you to drive, you **dick**_ answered that well enough. 

Barba wanted to laugh, to let out some tittering, climbing giggle, but feared he’d sound as rattled as he felt. He could just imagine it: some weak, empty noise dropping unrefined from his lips. Like spittle, of which there was still a spot of Jesse’s on Carisi’s shirt. 

“Is he with someone?”

Light as air, was how he sounded.

He should be so proud. 

“That’s his brother, I think. He said his brother had, like, a mess of a kids. Two sets of twins.” 

Barba looked again and suddenly a scene came into place, like pieces set by a prop master: Dan and his awful red hat were drawn into his own big Italian family--brother and parents, sister-in-law, rowdy nephews, aunts and uncles--and was embraced without a second thought. 

“You’re lucky you didn’t sleep with him, then,” Barba said, putting distance between them and Dan as soon as the light changed.

“Exceptionally fertile men? Taste awful. Believe me.”

Carisi cracked a smile, at once relieved that Barba was back to joking with him, and yet desperate for the moment to pass differently. Perhaps Barba would say something exceptionally ugly about Dan, allowing Carisi to gleefully agree--not because either of them meant it, but because their pain and embarrassment needed a voice. 

“I don’t believe you for one second.”

“I’m only speaking from experience,” Barba reasoned, and the notion had some bite. 

Carisi rolled his eyes. “You sleep with a lot of men with kids?”

“With their moms, too,” Barba said, showing a little teeth. 

Because they’d finally abandoned their duty of hiding his face in mortification, Carisi held his hands out like he was picturing a movie placard for a summer blockbuster. “Rafael Barba, _homewrecker.”_

“Alex has twins. There, beat you to it.” 

It wasn’t his mouth running away from him, or his good sense losing to a baser impulse to win, to expose every ruin in pursuit of a victory--even his own. No, this was a calculated decision; he’d wound a soldier, send him staggering out into the battlefield, and let him draw out interested parties. In whatever swell of pity dawned overhead and crept slowly to meet him, Barba would lay waste. 

He’d teach those tender souls kind enough not to judge him harshly. 

Carisi was quiet for a time. Then, just as Barba knew he would, he stepped out into naked terrain.

“This is turning out to be… some kind of morning, huh?” Carisi frowned at the dashboard. Barba kept his eyes on the road. “You said you two never…”

“Slept together, no. Of course I blew him.” 

“Raf.”

And wasn't _this_ a thrill: ruining himself.

“We were young. He lets me pretend we’ve both forgotten it.”

Getting impatient, Carisi pressed, “I asked you, though--”

“Forgive me if I didn’t want to tell you I’d blown my best friend. That I was _that guy_ even for one moment, who fell hard for a straight man.” 

His clipped explanation hadn't any _there_ there, because whatever Barba’s recollections on his own feelings, he purposely left Alex’s unaccounted for. He’d held belief small enough to be misconstrued for hope that Alex’s desires weren’t solely women, extramarital or otherwise. He dared not say as much; the man had afforded silence to Barba’s terrible pre-teen adoration, and so silence was given in return.

Carisi-- _bless him_ \--looked at fault, or half like he should be. 

If he was more generous with their romantic timeline, falling for straight men could be something Barba did more than once. 

“I get that you were embarrassed and all, but--I asked you.”

Barba carried staring straight ahead, sparing not even a glance at his petulant partner. 

“You were literally still in diapers when this happened.” 

Carisi scoffed; like _that_ should matter. Details weren’t the issue--only the blanket deception. The fact that Barba had thrown some smart line in his face when Carisi first asked-- _Oh, because I knew him, it stands to reason I slept with him?_ \--while the facts seemed to have born out in Carisi’s favor. 

“Why can't I know anything about you?” Carisi said, soft and drawn, in the voice he used against a pillow when Barba readied for work but Carisi had a later shift, and the disparity between time and routine felt like the breadth and depth of the Grand Canyon. He stared at Barba until the man broke in that ever-quiet, masterfully restrained way of his. Though he still didn’t look Carisi’s way, his shoulders slumped from their hitched position of ready defiance and pride.

“You know plenty. You've _seen_ plenty.” 

Barba chased a taxi through a yellow light and came out clean on the other side. 

“I'm more concerned with the fact that you've seen me in sweatpants than have an exhaustive knowledge of my sexual history.” It was a bawdy comment, lobbed with every assurance that it would fall clear of Carisi’s hapless grasp, and splatter. 

It was Carisi’s reticence to complain about the mess that made Barba regret anything, ever. 

“You think I'm hiding all this great stuff from you--I’m not. Just more of what you already know.”

“Okay,” Carisi said. 

And again, “Okay.” 

It was said with an air of finality, though Barba doubted at once this should be the matter’s end. Carisi might as well exit the vehicle at the next light, stand, and circle the car, pacing like he would during an interrogation. Barba had seen him deploy the move: he was all leading hips and swinging arms, moving only so as to entice others to follow. A veritable _song_ of a man. 

Barba said nothing in return. He only made a of grim determination--and for a second, bared every likeness of the Greek god Chronos himself--and waited for Carisi to take the bait. 

He didn’t. Instead, Carisi watched traffic, watched pedestrians make short work of a long block. He took an arresting breath from his nose and hummed through its passing. He smiled at another church feeding parishioners out of its great stone entryway while Barba wondered bitterly why it was that Rollins lived near so many, and why not cut out the middleman and join a convent? 

Barba was startled from his thoughts by a hand that moved to rest with a pleasant weight against his thigh. 

He wondered if Carisi was still putting on the moves, chasing some answer he’d made Barba forget he was meant to hide. 

Church bells rang out--not the stately effort of a religious empire, but the clamorous, awful prank of some kids who managed to steal away into a dusty crevice in a boarded-up bell tower. Carisi was delighted of course, and tried to honk the car’s horn in solidarity, but Barba halted him after two bleats with a withering look. He held his wrinkled his nose high as they passed; it would be a miracle if those kids escaped without lungfuls of asbestos. 

It was a craggy read on a brilliant effort to shatter a few blocks of city apart. 

Even Barba had done something of the sort in his youth. In his case, he, Eddie, and Alex decided to cut out early from the Sunday service--Barba’s idea, and instead they’d see a movie--and in their haste Eddie knocked over a clay pot. They’d all taken off running, Alex shouting that they’d broken a stained glass window and were all going to Hell.

Barba had been so terrified he didn’t look back, and only knew better when Eddie and Alex broke down in great heaps of laughter, tears running down their faces same as sweat. 

Barba had been too relieved to be mad at their joke.

_I’m not going to Hell,_ he’d thought, all of thirteen.

_It’s a miracle._

Barba thought he could do with one, now. 

Better still, perhaps he had one to impart. 

Why not give it to him? 

Nevermind that Barba believed Carisi’s joy was disingenuous, that the fact of the matter was, however much he adored Jesse and valued his time off-hours with Rollins, Barba could not accept the notion that Carisi could be so happy with such a paltry substitution. 

And the situation was wholly avoidable. Only Barba had stood in its way. 

“I’m sorry,” Barba said, an honest apology. They both understood he wasn’t speaking of Alex, now, or any such youthful indiscretions. But Barba wondered how long it would take Carisi to arrive at his true conclusion: that Barba had reached out to Rollins, yet he couldn’t have swallowed his pride and made the same effort towards the Carisis? Barba was sure this was on Carisi’s mind, hapless smiling be damned. And he didn’t appreciate the innocent fool routine; Barba knew Carisi better than that.

This was, after all, the man who had orchestrated Barba and his parents’ meeting with separate lies to both parties. Perhaps he’d expected Barba to return the ‘favor.’

He continued, “I know today was not what you wanted.”

“Are you kidding?” Carisi asked, breaking his own silence out of sheer confusion. “Today was great. Man, Jesse’s getting so big…”

“Okay, we get it, you’re the infant whisperer.” 

Barba saved his glare for tourists stopping to take photos in the middle of the crosswalk. The minute the light changed, he’d drive through--clipping heels, if need be. 

_(This_ was why he didn’t often drive in the city, Barba thought, catching himself. But all that had changed in the last year; being backseat to one’s own demise left a whole psychology 101 book’s worth of neuroses, the most considered and natural of which was to avoid being taken as either passenger or victim.) 

“You don’t have to lie to my face about it.”

“I’m not lying to you,” Carisi insisted, and let his tone soften to better reflect that he was not making an argument, only being honest. “I’m thanking you, because this was… really thoughtful.”

“So unlike me?” Barba surmised, then appeared to be chastised for stepping into his own trap. 

Carisi looked genuinely sorry, but quickly resolved himself. He threw off Barba’s animosity like coat unbefitting the weather, and gave Barba’s thigh a parting squeeze as he--once again--retreated a hand he worried was only ever going to feel offending.

“Kind of thought we’d settled this. Your refusal to see what’s good.”

“Only if it goes hand-in-hand with you recognizing that your relationships have changed, and it’s _nothing_ like what you wanted.”

Carisi went red-faced. He’d bruised Barba’s pride, certainly, but Barba had the nasty habit of hitting back twice as hard, of breaking open the chest cavity and twisting his opponent’s heart with his bare hands. This, when nothing of the sort was proportional, let alone deserved.

“I already said I was disappointed,” Carisi said, taking care to keep his tone level. “I don’t need to live and breathe that for days on end.”

Carisi watched Barba’s grip loosen on the wheel and realized the man was more disheartened by Carisi’s approach than frustrated by it, even if he played up his tone to the contrary. 

_(Why_ he took care not to sound saddened and disaffected wouldn’t hit Carisi until much later, and by that time, the damage would be done.)

“I see you getting hurt time and again. You could stand to take some precautionary measures.”

It felt like a lecture, a call to a level of morality and perfection Carisi did not think himself capable of attaining. And if it wasn’t his Church or his parents citing a well-traveled road towards happiness and fulfilment, it was Barba, taking whatever path was most expedient. Carisi felt Barba’s earlier words slither over his tongue and he wanted to asked, _What happened to, ‘right or wrong--if it makes me more happy than not, it's the right choice?’_

But there was stronger evidence in his arsenal; he had Barba’s kind words, certainly, but better still--he had the man’s deeds. 

“Raf, I’ve seen your ‘precautionary measures.’ All due respect, I don’t want to live like that.”

Barba gave him a sharp, unsettled look. Out from under his brow, his eyes hunted for Carisi’s most weakness, from which he would draw an ocean of blood.

“You think I’ve got problems?” he asked, the words cold enough to crack and bleed his lips on the way out. “What’s mine is yours, sweetheart.”

“What are you--”

_“I’m not going to give you what you want.”_

Barba spoke with a level of certainty Carisi rarely heard him use; justice and good sense may have been Barba’s guiding lights, but human error was a force of nature, and he bent to its will. A surefire conviction was never sure, and promises were promises up until the point they were nothing but sweet words with which to mask bitter deceptions. 

“I won't give you what your parents have, what Rollins has--a life like that, a _family._ It’s not here. It’s not in my power nor my interests to give.” 

Barba squared his shoulders--not so as to effectively deliver the death blow, but to keep himself upright when he inevitably saw it land over the unsettled space between Carisi’s pleading eyes. 

“So understand that.”

Carisi cleared his throat of a dry, winter's cough. Besides that, he was silent for the remainder of the drive.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lmao how fucking late is this 
> 
> Seriously though, I’m so sorry for making this story literally IMPOSSIBLE to keep your interest in, dear readers, but wow, did I ever want to not write it. I’m trying to rework my initial idea and hasten this thing’s end because I’ve completely lost my patience with the show. I now only want to finish this out of SPITE.

A light snow began to fall, first breezing across the windshield, then gathering gently along the wipers. There, it formed perfect little drifts that remained intact as Barba paced through the crawl of post-Mass Christmas morning traffic. 

Barba swallowed down the heat from his words, still laying thick over his tongue. 

Carisi, suffice to say, was feeling burned. 

_“I’m not going to give you what you want.”_

He’d lashed out with that silver tongue, each word cut on a razor’s edge. He’d said what he meant to but finished still hurt by Carisi’s lies, still embarrassed by that fact, but deeply relieved overall. 

He thought, _There._

He thought, _Good._

_We can’t move forward now._

And he couldn’t chance losing everything if they didn’t move forward.

Instead, hopefully, they could take a step back. That much arrived in Barba’s mind as the quintessential ideal: a return to that grace period between upsets, a time of being out and unbothered for it, of living a life established around mutual love and respect. Perhaps they could stop trekking ever forward to the next great hurdle and simply _rest,_ and enjoy what it was they’d had so far, all the most comfortable parts tried and true, and awaiting their return. 

Or, Barba reasoned, they could stop. And keep all that pleasantness for a memory, better still for being nearer than not. 

That alone was an intoxicating, powerful thought. He could end this, here and now. The fact that he had absolutely no desire to do so was almost secondary to the awful thrill he got considering it, anyway. 

Departure--desired or not, permanent or only confined to emotional ground--was all a part of an imaginary equation into which Barba fed all his experiences. In all things, there had to be give and take. He could risk some progress with his family, and lose the one person he regarded so highly in the process. He’d bet everything on Carisi in the past and found a wealth of returns, but who was to say it wasn't all just dumb luck?

_Beginners luck,_ even, on Carisi’s behalf, from which Barba gladly took favor. 

If he could be discerning, if he could look at himself and analyze and judge his own behavior, Barba would not be kind. He’d long felt too soft, too quick to welcome the joy that had settled in him, the delight touching his lips and coloring his thoughts so readily that the response had become automatic. Like breathing, he was smitten. 

It was Carisi’s doing. 

Nevermind that Barba liked Carisi for that; he did not like _himself_ for being taken so easily, and so far. When he’d last been so willingly led astray, so thoughtless with his body and senses so as to hand them over to another, he’d very nearly paid for it with his life. 

And Carisi was after as much: Barba’s life, as he liked it, was Carisi’s prize. He wanted to take over what Barba had, change it, eviscerate the peace and quiet and shunt out a bastardized version of something Barba never had, and did not particularly want this late in the game. What was the draw of _family_ to a man whose childhood of prayers concerned dissolving his own, and went unheard besides? His father never disappeared, the wounds never healed, and forget ever feeling _loved_ in the interim, Barba hadn’t felt _safe._

True, Barba had yet to disclose every gruelling detail of his father's mistreatment and abuse to Carisi. Still, he had to think Carisi could fill in the blanks for himself, and alter his expectations accordingly. 

If he refused, then it was that much clearer what Barba had to do: take a stand, fight back as best he knew how. His words--a different thing entirely from his feelings or thoughts--were there for him to finely craft to such a point that he need not recognize them. He could sharpen their edges and always draw blood with their deployment. 

And Barba remembered--wasn’t there a time he feared the bloodshed? Back when nothing was certain, where love was intimated but far from established, and he could not tell himself Carisi would sustain the blow, and believe it?

Now that he had what he wanted, Barba was quick to injure, to maim, to slash its throat. He felt compelled to do this, to amass his doubts and rain them down on Carisi, and watch as the man weathered the storm or drowned. 

It was sensible, but just the side of calculated to be deemed cruel. Barba took this opportunity to show himself as forever sharp, never frayed, and always certain in his ability to do harm as well as treat with promises and kinder gestures than he felt comfortable giving. He did this to remind himself his center was stone, not whatever Carisi seemed to think he was made of. 

A tender, _aching heart_ fit the bill of Carisi’s clichéd fantasy. 

Truthfully, the closest thing Barba let near his heart in that moment was embarrassment. He’d had other plans for their holiday, having envisioned the very spectacle of an unassumed life, the best New York had to offer in terms of dining, intellectual interest, beauty, and prestige. He would assume the height of living as a bachelor, but with a man at his side. All those possibilities were cast aside for this: a mother and child and standoffish boyfriend, a small apartment, and day drinking. The display was paper mache and scenes painted in broad strokes--a set to play on, not a world to inhabit. It was a sorry imitation of what Carisi was expecting to have: loving parents, a gaggle of sisters, and cousins and friends the likes of which Carisi would have known since infancy, all of them creeping like suburban sprawl through his Staten Island childhood home.

Barba was embarrassed that Carisi would still want them, and _pretend he didn’t,_ because it put the onus back on Barba. Barba, who was the problem, Barba, who wasn’t well-liked. Barba, who felt a deep and abiding guilt that Carisi would choose him and sacrifice the relationship he so valued with his family to do it. 

_Barba,_ who knew the sacrifice was too great, and the payoff too little.

Apropos of Barba’s silence, Carisi sighed. 

And it was like a shot going off. Barba stiffened at once, terrified and remorseful and frantic for a means to stop what felt like a gushing wound in his heart. His self-righteous grandstanding on the matter, his plans for attack--all were placed on ice at the prospect of this being a battle, and not merely an execution. 

_No,_ he thought. _Wait. Please wait. No, no, no._

But Carisi didn’t deliver any subsequent blow. In fact he said nothing, and beyond that didn’t look aggrieved, only sad. Barba again felt some relief in that, because much in the vein of the joy Carisi injected into every facet of his being, they likewise shared the sadness in which Barba wallowed. It wasn’t a fair shake on Carisi’s end, but then, Barba supposed he made out better in most of their exchanges.

The quiet held, and before long Barba realized what he was waiting for was his own self to betray the truce. 

He glanced at his partner as he drove into the underground parking facility around the corner from his apartment building. The dusty morning light eking out from between sheets of grey clouds was replaced by holds of fluorescent lighting amidst bouts of darkness. 

“Coming back to my place?” he asked, keeping his tone light, as if he hadn’t been an equal participant in the silent drive back from Rollins’ apartment.

“Unless that’s you asking me not to,” Carisi answered, and bless him, his voice sounded raspy from disuse. Just as quickly as Barba’s heart sank into a ready well of sympathy, it tightened with resolve. Surely this was yet another _ploy._

“Also, you drove us here, so…” 

“I don’t see a gun to your head.” 

The sharpness of his words cut like a blade, and neither spoke again for a moment, as if fearful it was _their_ tongue that had gone, and to open one’s mouth would be to let spill a river of blood. 

“Wait,” Carisi sighed as they rolled to a stop in Barba’s preferred parking spot. His hand returned to Barba’s thigh, but nothing about it was coy or inviting. He meant to keep the man in his place. “If we’re going to have this shitty conversation, we might as well be in your entirely needless status symbol.”

He was trying for jocular, something wry and loose that Barba might recognize and mimic. 

And maybe that worked on the nervous, awful masses to pass through his interrogation room, but Barba was made of sturdier stuff than they. 

“I don’t know why you’re bringing my car into this. You’ve only driven it through the wasteland that _is_ Staten Island every other weekend for the past six months.”

“I just mean in general. The subway is a New York _institution--”_

Barba cut off Carisi’s familiar--and fervid--defense of anything oriented towards the public; he’d once been a beat cop, and policing those spaces were his bread and butter. 

Policing people like _Barba,_ though Barba had never let it slip that he and his friends had been experts at turnstile jumping in their youth. There was never any money between them to pay the fare, and they could outrun every rookie cop sent to patrol the area.

(Admittedly, Barba still harbored the absurd fear that if he returned to the scene of the crime, he’d be recognized for his past dalliances, or worse--muscle memory would take over and he’d thoughtlessly jump the fare in a display of surprising athleticism and pretty criminality.)

“I’m a transportation snob and you want to reproduce. It’ll never work.”

Another beat of sadness bled over Carisi’s face before he thought better of it and tampered down the leak. His twisting lip staunchest the flow, and soon he regained his fortitude. 

“You just want to pick a fight,” he said. His tone wasn't accusatory, only tired, though by Barba’s count, those words only meant so many things in that order.

“I’m not doing anything right now. I could certainly stand to win one.” 

Whether Carisi knew this to be true or o my wanted to stay Barbas eager example, he took a different route. Spying defeat like a place on a map, he ventured towards its territory, but kept to the edges with questions and hedged bets. 

“If… this… is wrapped up in everything with my family right now--”

“It’s not,” Barba said, sounding annoyed. Whether he was tired of that line or embarrassed that it still rang true was anyone's guess. 

“Because I get it. And the date,” Carisi waved a hasty hand, hopeful they would not linger on that point, _“Dates._ I knew it was a shitty thing to do.”

“Yes, you’re not a complete idiot,” Barba said by way of agreement. Carisi didn’t challenge him there, and Barba worried that was becoming something of a trend. 

He sighed and allowed: “I know that wasn't you.”

Relief blossomed in Carisi’s heart as surely as it sweetly touched his eyelids, drawing them closed in reverence for an answered prayer.

Softly, and in a voice so sad it touched Barbas ears as sweet, Carisi said, “I didn’t want you to know they were doing things like that. I didn’t want you to think they didn’t like you.”

“Carisi. I _know_ they don’t like me.”

It wasn’t a point Carisi could argue, and Barba had to commend him for his honesty. 

Barba stared at the car’s dashboard, gaze traveling from the wheel to the GPS he rarely accessed, though he did not doubt he’d find evidence of Carisi’s use of it, if he looked. Carisi didn’t mind leaving his fingerprints on Barba’s things. Whether he was slightly reordering Barba’s bookshelves or moving his least favorite record to the back of the stacks, the man ran interference in their lives, begging smoothness with beer in the fridge, and scotch tucked away. Barba didn't like to think how much of that he demanded in one way or another. 

“You really want to have all this out?” He asked tiredly. “We’re going to solve every issue, here and now? Just you, me, and the carbon monoxide?”

Carisi leaned over and took Barba’s key from the ignition. 

“Just you and me. No holds barred.” Carisi made himself sound confident despite knowing a battle of wits and words was one from which Barba would doubtless emerge the victor. Carisi hoped only to set the terms for peace. “Let's just… not bring this home, okay?” 

_Impossible,_ Barba thought, burt didn't argue the point outright. He knew they would dissuade one another of that idea soon enough. 

He decided to be out with it, to unleash the hell Carisi did not know he was asking for. 

It came so easily. 

Barba wasn't so taken with himself so as to be surprised at his own spontaneous cruelty. He said what he did, sparking a flame in the dark cold of the garage, illuminating every shortcoming Carisi refused to see. 

“You’ll want to move in and get married and have kids and grow old and I _can’t_ \--I don’t _want_ any of that.”

Carisi’s heart dropped, rolled, and took off a cliff’s edge into an eternal abyss. 

He swallowed, sending a wet breath down to follow it. 

“None of it?”

And to the best of Carisi’s estimation, Barba looked a mixture of contrite and sorry for his statements, as though he could not choose which was worse: feeling these things or having his hand forced towards sharing them. Carisi didn't take much pity on him either way. 

Barba hesitated--not because he had nothing to say and Carisi had answered as well for him, but because he realized his response would hang like a question no matter his phrasing. Because Carisi was sweet like that; Barba could state a simple fact--I like Thai--and Carisi would take it for a request. 

“I want you to move in,” Barba said, and the fact that this was the third time he’d struck on the idea and finally hit paydirt did not wholly escape him. 

He added hastily, “If you want.”

Then, “Maybe. In the spring?” 

Barba liked to think he was being generous, but corrected himself. It was only that wanting it made him feel good. And good sense, given the imagined shelf-life of any relationship, was far from his original calculations. Barba was compelled by his very nature to offer his reasoning, and because he could not cite housing costs off the top of his head, he went the simpler route: “I’d like not to plan for our nights together like a child’s slumber party.”

Barba felt his cheeks warm over as he answered for what held as a hard line above Carisi’s brow, indicating worry and heartache, things for which Barba had complete ownership.

“And of course I want to grow old--that’s not another--death wish type of--thing.”

Carisi’s heart found traction in the impossible, and began its slow ascent. 

“Yeah, I want to move in…. Spring, if you think you'll still want me to--”

Barba have a dismissive shake of his head at Carisi’s hedging. “Yes, yes of course I will.”

In a moment’s reprieve, both men reflected on their tenuous agreement. Carisi even ducked his head and bit into the smile threatening to dig at his cheeks. Barba did no such thing; it was almost _darling,_ this kind of talk, but their problems did not begin and end at his doorstep. 

They spanned the distance of universes, and caught like loose threads on every passing fancy. 

Shyly, Carisi pulled that thread. 

“You think I want to marry you?”

The question was soft, and not just in its quiet asking. Carisi took genuine care with the words, touching them all over, warming them with his breath. He meant to nurture them in every phase of their being, to make them strong enough to stand up to the inevitable and outright denials they’d face in the world. Goodness was always questioned, doubted, and distorted. There was nothing necessarily malicious about that; the response was first the product of experience well before it was a cruel and chosen inclination.

But necessity--not chance--ruled Barba. It demanded his mouth move in tandem with his thoughts, so he spat a hasty response like his tongue was coated in kerosene.

“Oh, _please._ Love, marriage, that’s entirely your wheelhouse. Of course you do.” Barba blinked, blanched at what he’d said, what he’d assumed was _there,_ if not desired. He felt an awful heaviness roll over his tongue--the drawing sensation of sickness, of a spell of vomit that would not improve the situation, but God help him, it would draw the eye. 

“Shit. Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Carisi answered, breathless, like that much was owed to Barba, but he’d passed it off instead. _“Yes.”_

“We’re not,” Barba said at once, his gut clenching at it had when he thought perhaps Carisi didn't want him in that pen-to-paper, here-before-all-of-our-friends kind of way. 

“No,” Carisi agreed, an equal ball of nerves flaring in his own belly. It was yet another notion he’d put to rest in his youth, and would need some delving into theoretically before he could consider the act itself. 

But the coiling sense of anxiety and excitement did not calm, and Carisi knew if he left them to fester, they'd fast become the first stirrings of hope.

Barba cast him a wary eye, as if he had any clue as to what he'd started.

“These are early days, my friend. Early days.”

“For real,” Carisi agreed readily, though a smile lingered on his lips. It twitched there, a kind of emotional muscle spasm. Then it worked itself away like a proud boxer taking some expert hits. Barba thought much of Carisi’s bright disposition was tempered by a mixture of sustained blows and taking Barba’s position into account. 

“Can we talk about… those things, though?”

“Could you remove my molars with a hex wrench instead?” Barba muttered. “I think both would be equally pleasant.” 

Carisi was undeterred. 

“Please?”

He asked so sweetly, and Barba did not know what was worse: denying him outright, or answering him truthfully. 

Barba sighed. _Go ahead._

Carisi took a breath and looked at his hands, laid loose and open in his lap, like they suddenly held all his hopes and dreams, and he meant to trust Barba with the heavy load. 

Barba saw him for understandably hesitant.

“I want to get married. Someday.”

As soon as he said it, Carisi was sold on his own love for the idea. It was like rediscovering a forgotten childhood dream--something once held as an endless source of delight, silly and feckless and totally unactionable, like growing up to become the moon. Now a very real possibility, the notion threw him back a few feet, so he got up and came running towards it again.

The warmth imbued in his words gave life to the following implication: _maybe even to you._

But Barba had his doubts. More than that, he had ambitions, lofty and great, while Carisi had beliefs, and the disparity between the two was vast. 

Carisi’s bright-eyed and dimpled face wasn't one he was eager to lie to--the man could tell, _every time,_ and Barba knew those weedy half-truths he sported for his own protection crushed Carisi, _every time._

His shifted, first looking down, then away, then glanced at his reflection in the windshield. He wore the idea on his face as if to judge how it might compliment him physically, like a new tie or cut of a lapel. Marriage was a thing Barba imagined could be seen, and not by the glint of any jewelry. He thought it might very well change the shape of his face, tending to lines and lightening shadows, altogether making him more agreeable to all things, if indeed he succumbed to this. 

“I wouldn’t mind it.”

“What a ringing endorsement,” Carisi teased, but there was hope enough there to sate the younger man. 

“I suppose I’d more appreciate the sentiment than the institution.”

“Aw, you just want to be asked.”

Barba gave him a long, studious look. “Don’t, though.”

Carisi rolled his eyes. When they lingered shyly on his hands again, Barba knew he was deterred and somewhat hurt, and spoke next in a denial similar to Barba’s in an effort to defer yet another lashing. 

“I’m not going to get gay-married right out the gay-gate.”

A corner of Barba’s mouth quirked upwards--an act of some doing, as nothing near a smile reached his eyes. 

Though the entire conversation hinged on the hypothetical that was themselves managing to sustain a love through time, to choose its practice even when the alternative seemed wiser or less painful, Barba knew the subject presented itself differently for Carisi. It appeared in his mind bathed in sunlight, kissed with morning dew. Marriage--no matter the composition of those party to one--was still as perfect a construct as he knew to exist. 

He saw it first and foremost as a pretext to a happy life. 

He wasn’t naive enough to think it was part and parcel to its own success; rather, he trusted in the construct, the _promise._ The agreement to always _try._

“We’d have to postpone the lavish event, anyway. What with diverting our funds to solving the mystery of your adult-onset stutter.”

Carisi laughed out loud--a sudden, frayed, and willfully happy thing. He ran a hand through his hair and asked--not to Barba, necessarily--what would _that_ be like? 

Before Barba could make some slackened comment about the tax breaks, he found himself answering simply and honestly. 

“I am inclined to be monogamous.” 

It was his unfussy way of saying he’d be forthright and devoted by default. _What I'm doing now? **All** that I'm doing? I think I can sustain it._

Carisi smiled sweetly, still more encouraged by each offering Barba made freely. 

“Yeah, me too.”

Barba bit his tongue to stave off a snide comment about Carisi’s more recent tendencies, because in that moment he believed, like Carisi did, nothing less. 

He wanted to be his best, sharpest self, particularly when it came to words and their use as deterrents. Being with Carisi--and the odd inclination he had to be _considerate_ with him--made Barba question whether it wasn’t conversations he wanted to have at all. 

He shelved the words he knew would end them. 

He took a breath. 

“Kids?” Barba asked, and couldn’t keep the misery out of his voice. He was doubly ashamed to hear Carisi adopt much the same tone in response. That was solely Barba’s doing, an inflection that Carisi used only with him. 

“Yeah. I want them.”

“You weren't going to have any when you planned to become a priest.” 

It wasn't so much a winning argument as it was just _Barba,_ driving home a point simply because he'd found one protruding and untended from his subject. 

“I wasn't going to have a lot of things,” Carisi said, choosing now not to fool himself any longer into thinking a life of hiding--whatever the cause--could be worthwhile. He’s always ache to know some deeper truth--his own, though for So long he’d been satisfied only knowing the secrets other kept--because now, since Barba, Carisi had something he’d never had before.

Proof. 

Simple, irrefutable proof that being honest with himself had its perks, a man he loved chief among them. 

Then, like it was as much the secret as his sexuality had once been, Carisi answered Barba’s question in full: “I want a family. I want to be a father.”

Barba--unfortunately--did not have it in him to willfully deny Carisi’s sincerity. The younger man's great, gasping heart was on full display; Barba would have felt just as right denying the rising sun. He chose instead to swerve and avoid it as best he could. 

“Do you want a dog?”

“In addition to the kids?”

Barba allowed himself to feel the full brunt of his dismay. Unlike the pretext of fatherhood, it wasn’t a moral failing to have a dog and not particularly like it.

He stared straight ahead, eyes on his future where it stood silhouetted in a judge’s robes or prestige or some combination of the two, and spoke smoothly, so as to allow no wrinkle or loose thread for Carisi to mind like a hopeful alternative. 

“I don’t want them. There’s responsibility enough in my work, and joy enough with a partner. With you. I’m--very happy. If you can believe it.” 

He seemed embarrassed to say so, and Carisi seized on that fact. 

Embarrassment, shame, _longing._ He knew those things as altogether being one. 

Barba did not. 

“You don’t think something’s missing? You don’t want to share all of that?”

“No,” Barba said simply. Carisi couldn’t seem to fathom his response, so Barba sifted the sands and found another answer, same as the first.

“I don’t want a family in that way,” he said, and it wasn’t an apology. 

“Oh.” Carisi made no move towards total acknowledgement of Barba’s sentiment; that, to him, was a bridge he could not suffer burning. 

But Barba kept his gaze level and sure enough, and Carisi began to feel pressured for a response, just as he’d wheedled one from Barba. 

“Sounds final.”

“It’s just how I feel.”

“Because--and this is just my opinion here, whatever--I think you’d make, like, the best dad.”

Barba closed his eyes in a grimace. “Carisi…” 

A stronger word might have stopped the onslaught of praise, words so bright and untrue, Barba heard them for profane in their abundance. But he suddenly didn’t have--couldn’t wield--a word strong enough to do such damage, and Carisi’s adulations began to mount into something unrecognizable. 

“You’re smart and you’re kind and more patient than you give yourself credit for. I can see it--I can see _you_ \--as a father.”

A sudden burst of embarrassment and unease had Barba feeling sick at the very thought. This wasn't idle talk for how a new diet or haircut could change his life; this was a categorical misunderstanding of his person from someone he saw as closest to knowing him fully. 

“Please don’t… think of me like that.”

The disappointment in his voice, the way it loosened all his steely armor, wouldn't do. Barba changed swiftly towards the grit and determination that colored the constant fight he held with himself: that he was right in most things, but a lifetime of searching had made him an expert in his own strengths and shortcomings. 

“The one thing I learned from my father in this regard is, if you don’t think you want kids, don’t test the theory by having them anyway. Because there’s a very real possibility you’ll never come around to their existence, and they’ll know. And it will be ruinous.” 

Knowing he’d shared far more than intended, Barba set himself upon the task of checking emails on his phone. Were he a nervous man, rather than one beset with a ready addiction, the act could read for a tick, not an occupation. 

Weakly--because the reality Barba posed of his own upbringing made Carisi that--Carisi said, “You would never do that to someone.”

“I would never risk it, certainly.” Barba did not so much as blink or bat an eye away from his phone.

“You just want to… live and die? That’s it?”

“More the former than the latter,” Barba said, frowning. Jokes to that effect no longer made Carisi squirm.

_At least one of us is over it._

“Good talk, huh?”

“Yeah, actually,” Carisi said, the reply just as sharp as he meant it. 

Barba stared past his phone. He wondered what his colleagues would think, seeing him sat in a parking garage, nothing keeping him there but his own heavy heart and the fact that his keys were fisted in Carisi’s hand. 

Then he wondered why that thought should ever find him.

“We're not like this,” he insisted. “Let's not _be_ like this.”

In lieu of, _Really? Snide and petty? You’re like that all the time,_ Carisi said nothing. He gave Barba the space to lay out the facts and explain himself. 

“It's not--you speak, I listen. I speak, you talk. I know you're hearing me when I tell you I don't want children. You just can't seem to believe it.”

Proving Barba’s point, Carisi couldn't help but rush in, words flooding out and sense chasing fruitlessly after.

“I just think…”

It wasn't entirely about children; Barba knew that. It was only to the benefit of his own pride that he did not recognize it more fully. Carisi used _married with children_ as a stand-in, a requisite marker for happiness. And intellectually, he knew better, too. He had a great, wandering drive towards his own ideals of success, a mastering of which took ample time and dedication. Whether it was a law degree or an ADA, Carisi was always in pursuit of his next great joy. 

Barba hadn’t lived his life that way. There was security, first, then opportunity, and so long as he worked every waking moment of his life, success would buoy him from exhaustion, and prestige would come later. He’d never--really--pursued a lover. 

Barba supposed Carisi deserved to know he’d changed Barba’s mind before, and should appreciate the rarity of such an accomplishment.

But with that decision to laud Carisi’s doings in their relationship came the mounting sadness as Barba realized how little he may actually want from it. Happiness, which had always been this distant thing, open to others but not for him, was something Carisi gave freely. It rolled off him in waves. Barba was content to play in the shallow end, reaping the rewards of a good man’s attention and desire without having to dive too deeply for it. 

Barba didn’t want to hold his breath for a lifetime. 

He decided to say all it was that he could, and leave no room for error should Carisi decide it simply was not enough. 

“You’ve convinced me, you know? That’s there’s time enough in a day to feel… lighter. To want that, and to set yourself up for it. To feel it.” Picking at a smudge on the car’s upholstery, Barba only felt foolish for the venue, not the sentiment shared therein. “I’m a lot of things on my own, but I’m never as happy as I am when I’m with you.”

His mouth twisted around those words well enough, but Carisi read sadness in Barba’s eyes. It hung there, a dilapidated party banner. 

“I don’t want you to change,” Barba continued, trading heartache for certitude. “I like your… big, stupid heart. I like how hard you work, how good you are.” 

Then his eyes flashed dark as he focused them on Carisi, finally meeting the gaze the younger man had lowered and angled to catch his. When he opened his mouth to next speak, his lips wet and parted, the words seemed to exist before his saying them. Carisi’s brow furrowed and he twisted just a hair to his left, like his training had kicked in and he knew to duck and cover. 

“What I want-- _whatever I want_ \--you give me.”

Barba’s voice was heavy, purposeful in a way that carried weight and strained his faculties. He swallowed, a noiseless affair that did only the work of toying with his jaw and exposing his throat. 

“And there's a great… discrepancy… in how far that is reciprocated.” 

Sentimentality wasn’t a good look for him, so Barba tried to smile, to show wit where he could corkscrew it into his features. It touched his brow and the bow of his lips. 

“I know what you want, and I don’t expect you’ll have it with me.” 

Over Barba’s words Carisi heard a distant ringing in his ears. He knew it originated from nothing in the physical world; it was his own self at work, his mind playing protector for his heart. 

The ringing continued as long as Barba put forth sentiment after weak sentiment. 

“I understand… if we have arrived at an impasse, here.” 

“Huh?” Carisi asked, absent either agreement or distrust. He genuinely seemed to not understand Barba’s quiet, careful plotting towards a way out--not the man’s own, but Carisi’s. And because the destination was unheard of, the journey only lost Carisi all the more. 

Barba’s tone--like his tense--shifted, as if he thought by unearthing this thing, he’d damned them to its consequences. A sigh dragged itself out of his throat, coating everything he had to say with dust and grime. 

“Truthfully, I was hoping to put off this conversation for another couple of years.” 

The ringing became unmanageable, and Carisi felt compelled to shout over it.

“Can we?” he blurted out, his feeling of panic outweighing any embarrassment. “Just forget it? Next election cycle, we’ll pick it back up.”

“No,” Barba said, sounding surer than he felt. “Let’s have it now. I should be honest with you.” 

He wanted to take Carisi’s hand--not to assure the other man, but to comfort himself. He decided it would be too cruel, so his hands stayed in his lap where Barba watched them fiddle with the button on his coat before he raised his gaze and found Carisi’s bright blue eyes begging him not to speak--another thing Barba couldn’t do. 

_I’ll just be cruel, then._

“I won’t raise children,” he said, and knew that was the easy part. Speaking for himself always was. “I won’t be a father. I… refuse.” 

It was when he found himself confronted with the will and need of others that his confidence began to splinter apart. 

“I know that your desire for a family of your own is… bone-deep. It’s at your very core, and it is admirable.” 

Barba saw it even now, in everything Carisi did and chose to be: he went about every means of caring and providing for others, of protecting his own people. And Barba was proud to be with a man like that-- _Eddie_ was a man like that, and whatever his faults where Alex was concerned, Barba thought highly of him. Always had.

Still.

He was sorry to see his own stock in that regard come up short in comparison. 

He wasn't bothered by his own conclusion, only the discord, the fact that there would be this vast gully between them, and no means of bridging it.

Barba knew he was edging towards sentimentality again, and that there was no _winning_ this argument was his true hang-up.

“It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing anyone should keep from you, least of all me.”

He smiled ruefully. 

“Here we are again,” he said. “Me, stifling you.” 

Carisi closed his eyes in shame. 

“Please don’t joke about that.”

Finally, Barba couldn’t help himself. Even if the gesture was a foregone conclusion and would only serve to further break hearts, he took Carisi’s hand in his own. He dragged his thumb over familiar knuckles, long fingers that had covered him time and time again. Digits he’d tasted and felt in the dark of his bedroom, but known best--and happiest--in his hand, swinging slightly as they walked their measured steps. 

“Listen,” he said, the confession weighing heavy on his tongue, balancing between his tonsils and waiting to be swallowed down or spit into being, depending on whether Barba chose to be kind or be brave. 

“If I’m being realistic--and selfish--which, really, is the same thing…”

He tried to smile. It didn't take. 

“...I know you’d want to wait me out. You’d stay by my side thinking I’d change my mind. Maybe I’d get another two, three years before you hit that 35-year marker and remembered yourself and all there was you’ve always set out to have.”

Barba knew he could have him until then, but not after.

“I won’t be upset,” Barba said, his tone rock-steady not because he felt so sure, but because he had decided to be. “When you go. You’ll find what you want, and I want that for you.”

Carisi looked at him, blue eyes set frighteningly hard in his face. Barba imagined never prying them out again. 

Slowly, Carisi began to understand Barba must just _stare at him_ and _think these things._ The realization stole the answers from his heart, emptying the arsenal he kept for when Barba played a little too rough with counterfactuals. Carisi had nothing with which to guard himself, so he defaulted to DEFCON 1-- _self destruct._

“What _the fuck._ ”

He was ashamed to only manage a whisper.

The strength to continue speaking arrived only with necessity to do so.

“You can’t just say that.” 

He pushed and willed himself over the hurdle his weak and broken voice left, its remains piled high as a mountain on loose gravel. That’s what Barba’s sharpness was, he’d come to believe: transitory. It came in waves and receded, streaking its subjects but hopefully not leaving too much damage in its wake. Carisi, for his own, was always of a mind to rebuild. He always found a place to start. 

“You can’t put that out there and--we can’t be _normal_ again. _The fuck._ ”

Barba shrugged. The effort--if not the outcome--was almost as impersonal as he’d envisioned. 

“You’re surprised? That I could claim to be supportive and actually follow through?” 

_“That's_ what you're doing?” 

Before Carisi could even think to challenge the not-so-thinly-veiled dig at his family, Barba continued, “I don’t expect you to compromise if a family is something you truly want. But I can’t commit myself to that responsibility solely in allegiance to you. It would be worse if I let you think otherwise.” 

The point was simple. He remembered the days spent in abstract argument with Carisi, back when simplicity enough. 

Tentatively--another cruelty, now, because hadn’t the _S.S. Concerned Partner_ sailed and sank just shy of its horizon?--Barba asked, “Okay?” 

Carisi, believing Barba was being openly glib with him, responded in kind. 

He got out of the car, and Barba followed because it seemed like the better option over sitting in dejected solitude. Carisi looked distressed, standing with one arm shelved on his hip, the other raised akimbo so as to spinder his right hand across his face. Behind it, his eyes were worried shut. His coat was open, too--and not the gorgeous parisian-collar number from Barba’s closet, either, which had warmth stitched into its very seams and could function without the extra effort. That coat donned Barba’s form, and Carisi’s was his own winter coat, a simple black insulated thing shaped like a trussed roast, indistinguishable from half the outerwear on the streets of New York at any given second. 

Barba wanted to tell him to zip it up, to take care in much the same way Barba never thought twice about doing for himself. 

“Are you breaking up with me?” 

To his credit, Carisi only sounded unclear, and aggravated besides. 

“On Christmas?”

But there, _there_ was the desperation Barba hated to hear. The kind he invited. 

“...In a parking garage?”

And the heartbreak. 

_Fuck._

“No,” Barba said at once. His voice was soft despite the immediacy there. He meant not only to contain this matter, but to soothe its hurt. His feelings for Carisi grew less and less abstract by the minute, allowing him to fuse adoration with act. He’d benefitted from a sharp left turn since their official coupling, but for as great a distance as he had left to go, every little push helped. 

Though, to the subject of those slow-won affections, Barba was sure his efforts felt like pulling teeth.

And here--his psyche boasting another doubt borne of his own thinking, then hoisted unfairly on Carisi’s shoulders--Barba caught himself, if not in time. Because his ego got ahead of his good sense, and Barba bristled at the thought of being so uncouth. Nevermind that he was bearing that estimation out in great form, it wasn't his _intention._ Intellectually, Barba knew how little a difference that made. In the moment, he was blind to it. 

_“No,_ I'm not. _I'm not._ I'm just explaining how it is you'll be leaving me, eventually.”

“So you're doing the worst thing, but as if it was me.” Carisi choked on a laugh. “Oh my God. You… are such a dick.”

Barba shut the door on his car, certain now they would not again be settling into its warmth. He shoved his hands into his pockets for that. 

He kept his chin up, however. The cold seeped near, coiling around his throat as if to strangle him. 

“I have no excuse,” he said, neither ambivalent nor smarting. “We didn't find each other too young. I'm not jobless or confused or scared out of my mind... I'm fully formed.”

“Fully formed,” Carisi repeated, a touch wistfully. Like he once was: son, brother, cop. “What does that even mean.”

Barba suspected he already knew.

Standing on opposite sides of Barba’s car, clumps of grey-brown snow still clinging to its wheels, neither man spoke, and neither man needed to.

Barba recalled an early instance in their coupling: meeting at a cafe on a weekend, back before a lack of Carisi’s perpetual presence in his home necessitated their _meeting_ anywhere. The intention was not to stay a while and play at a date--they were a ways past that, Barba thought--but things were uneasy, still, after the trial, and just the faintest whiff of new that they’d both come to a silent agreement: they’d slept together and ripped themselves apart, but did they like each other? It made sense enough to try and find out. 

The place was unusually slow, and Carisi acted as though Barba should make a good impression in his new neighborhood, so he stuffed some bills in the tip jar before returning to their table with a coffee for himself, Barba’s pastry order, and his own. It was a pretty little scene: outside, the City was rebounding from winter. Inside was cozy, and the pair had between them coffees and a day’s worth of caloric intake in a single sugared brioche and cake sampling. Without preamble, Carisi went at both items with a knife, halving them. 

_“There’s no need to be cute,”_ Barba had said slowly over the display. _“Or presumptuous.”_

Carisi had looked up, then down at what he’d done, and laughed.

Then he explained it was because of his sisters. Growing up, when they went out to eat they’d get a haul of desserts and promptly quarter them, ensuring everyone got a taste. 

Barba had said, _“Well, I’m an only child,”_ the implication being that what Carisi had done was a crime against nature. 

_His_ nature.

Carisi had only smiled and completed the exchange, his reasoning--withheld, as he did with most of the moralistic lessons he quietly thought others could stand to learn--being that Barba could make an exception. 

That Carisi could be that exception. 

And here they were again, their respective upbringings--and the mindsets borne of those upbringings--butting up against one another, scraping the paint, ruining the finish. 

Barba tried now as he had before to explain that _this was it_ with him. This was how and who he was. He would not surrender to a life not of his choosing, because he’d done enough of that--living in poverty, living in fear--and curbing his behavior was no longer an option. He would not again be a stranger to himself. 

Sometimes, Barba doubted Carisi’s ability to understand at all. 

Middle class, white, church-going, two parents in the workforce--a picture painted in all the same strokes and any other family in the neighborhood he grew up in. Barba could appreciate how such a life could contain a boy, but just as there were walls, there were doors swinging open to greet him. When college struck his fancy, he asked his mother for money for textbooks instead of knowing there was none. Carisi arrived from a world where there were savings and pensions and annual summer vacations and still more money socked away for rainy days. 

Barba always knew what he and his mother didn’t have. He helped to balance his mother’s checkbooks as soon as she felt confident in his ability to do the math, so he knew they lived or died by those numbers. His father contributed very little; the apartment and the boy--those were Lucia’s responsibilities, and Barba’s father supposedly took care of _her._

But Barba knew what little money his father earned from whatever job he clung to went into the bottle or on a strange woman’s nightstand. 

(Barba said this much to his face, once, got a broken wrist for his trouble and was told in no uncertain terms: _I don’t pay your mother for it. I don’t pay any of them for it.)_

An early life riddled with uncertainties made Barba loathe to contend with them now. Even those Carisi tended and perfumed for him could just as well sour. 

Far from romantic, Barba wanted a match in terms of stability, prospect, and shared nuance. Practicality, he thought, had its place alongside matters of the heart. He’d have those things in a partner, or no partner at all. 

But then, sometimes, he wanted a lover, full stop. 

It stuck it right between the ribs and hoisted him up, feet from the ground. He’d gladly swing for that perfect, painful delight. 

He wanted warmth and adoration and care, coupled with just enough bite that a departure from those softer treads would never be boring, and coming back to them again was a natural turn, not a retreat. 

He wanted _Carisi,_ who was as ambulatory as the best of them.

And in having him, Barba in turns nurtured and abandoned the idea that he held an abiding, untouchable love for the man. He forgot it at times, or it went misplaced, but in just one breath it would be back, filling him up, making him still more human than determined by blood and tissue alike. 

Barba let his gaze stray from Carisi as he stared at the stained cement floor of the parking garage. 

How did one prepare himself not to feel human anymore? 

Across from him, Carisi rubbed too-hard at his face, like he was trying to see something--through his forehead, specifically--but was audience only to a vast galaxy of stars, each producing a dull roar and a bleak death-glow. 

“This isn’t fair. You’re still mad about all the--with my family--and the _dates--”_

Carisi lost the gumption to carry on his complaint. A long, beleaguered sigh twisted through him, and by the time the last of it passed his lips Carisi looked at Barba, let his gaze travel from the man’s elegant nose--red, now, from the cold--to his throat, and down the long line of his coat.

The black one, which Carisi had once borrowed and felt so strangely at home in. He liked Barba in it better, thought it made him look timeless and severe. Almost priestly in that respect, bound to nothing worldly, but a conspirator to all that lay beyond. 

The sight inspired in Carisi the familiar urge to confess.

“When I told you that day, I thought that was it. I thought we were done. And then you said we weren’t, but that I should go away, I knew we would be.” Carisi saw his breath as he spoke--a realer thing than the possibility he’d leave this garage with his heart still intact in his chest. “I think now that I should have. Maybe you would have really taken me back if you’d just been right about me leaving.” 

The next breath he drew was wet and like swallowing ocean water: salty, sickening, and telling. 

“But I couldn’t risk it.” 

Then, feebly, he attempted to extract the answer he needed to hear. 

“You know?” 

Barba just shook his head; there was no going back in time to rearrange the facts. The outcome would always be this. 

“No,” he agreed. “It’s not fair.” 

And that could have been it.

But, Carisi was young. Time and the past and things done therein were not the behemoths of existence Barba saw them as, but mere coincidences that, when shared between two people, could themselves be re-rendered. Fact could come unglued with enough reasoning to the contrary, and forgiveness was a solvent for all things. 

“I'm upset about it, too, okay?” Carisi spoke very genuinely, and as if he’d ever been successful in keeping his hangups from Barba’s ready and total knowledge. 

“I thought they could be better, and you could get to know them then.” A sorry little laugh rattled through him, longing as it went, and Carisi heard himself for hollow enough that he did finally pocket his hands, a subconscious attempt to better assemble himself. “You know, I hear this every day and I don’t even believe me saying it, but--I didn’t want to hurt you. Doing what I did didn’t stop that from happening.”

Barba blinked in surprise. 

“I’m not hurt.”

“You’re a bad liar.” 

“This isn’t that,” Barba insisted, and knew from the jump in Carisi’s brow that Carisi had been successful in getting him to give something away, and they were both a little impressed by that. “I understand what you were trying to do. I am merely… resigned to our respective realities.” 

Carisi looked at Barba, not believing a word of it. Resignation wasn't Barba’s style. But, then, neither was the truth in this instance. 

“Okay,” Barba huffed, like he’d been bullied into it. “Alright. I’m--I was a little heartbroken.” Barba straightened up, like he had to physically shoulder this fact, and even for not being able to see it on his own face, did not like the look of it. “But that’s life.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Carisi said--a plea on both their accounts. 

Barba didn't deny him, but mocked tiredly, _“I_ don’t believe in reality.”

“You don’t believe in giving up.” Of this, Carisi was certain. Barba was a man who’d saved his own life in ways big and small, and literal besides. He was a man who wrote contingency plans into the seams of those ultimate ends, true, but there wasn't one for _this,_ for plaintively walking away. 

Not empty-handed, to be sure. 

“Fact is, I think you’d take a deal.”

It was a brazen dare, and worse--said with complete confidence. 

And if Barba wasn't mistaken, he'd say Carisi fashioned himself after Barba to make it. 

They stood seemingly opposed, but a strange reflection began to settle in each man’s face as he weighed the challenge. Barba knew Carisi was goading him into accepting the great, bleeding heart he sought to give. Carisi was watching for so much as a drifting arm, a finger’s twitch--whatever might lead to an outstretched hand.

“Our relationship isn’t a suicide pact. You can bow out gracefully.” Barba spoke steadily, the words emerging as if by summonce. He did not eagerly dive into them. 

He was cautious. 

_Someone had to be._

Carisi stood his ground, squaring his shoulders like Barba had and, in doing so, further likened their forms. 

“It’s also not some line scribbled in your high school yearbook. I mean this. I want this.”

The statement carried with it a question, and Barba could not let it go unanswered. It was too easy.

“I want you, too.” 

He softened, unintentionally and irrevocably. 

“I--love you.” 

Somehow, it got harder to say even as Barba was more inclined towards saying it. He felt the weight of those words, heard the multitudes they contained. Barba certainly liked hearing the sentiment from Carisi, from whose lips it sounded so sweet and sincere. Carisi spilled his whole self into those words, fitting nicely inside their depth, whereas Barba always seemed to graze the surface and never plunge too far. _I love you,_ he would say, the cadence all wrong, like a record skipping. He only came across as sincere when he was desperate, not after he’d won.

“I love you,” he repeated, and even for sounding sad, he decided it sounded right. The cold helped. It forced the warmth needed to break through the bullshit he’d piled high to grant himself cover. “But that’s not everything, all the time. Is it?”

He could have scooped the resolve rolling off Carisi by the handful. 

“I want those three years,” Carisi said.

Barba sighed his name but the younger man did not relent.

“It doesn’t feel fair I should have to ask for them, because I think we’re understood, you and me. For whatever doubts we got, that should never be one.” As the thought found him, Carisi began to slowly shake his head in disdain. 

Barba was glad to hear his voice again, after that.

“I don’t want to leave. Please don’t make me.” 

This, unlike what he’d begged before, arrived not on waves of uncertainty, but steeped in assurance. 

It wasn’t that Carisi believed he knew Barba’s thinking; he toyed with that notion when they discussed legal maneuvers, but tried not to overstep into the inner workings of Barba’s heart and mind. He’d been disappointed there, before.

No; here, Carisi saw the facts. He saw Barba’s anger and embarrassment and knew the man was hurting and ready to strike out at the nearest target. And because he was beloved, Carisi knew not to fortify himself in armor or lay like a lamb set to slaughter. 

He’d just ask.

Because as much as it hurt to do so, as foolish as Carisi was made to feel standing before the man he loved and who loved him, asking if all that were so, it was the surest way to an answer. Barba relished in having all the answers. 

The moment Barba looked plaintive and primed to answer, Carisi cut in, throwing together the last word. 

“And don’t--don’t you think of _me_ like that. Like I’ve got an expiration date. Like I’m _milk._ Like I'm not as good as my word, or you don't know me at all.”

“Just--” Barba started to say, but hesitated, fearful he might blurt out that he was won over, it was decided, yes, forever _yes,_ and could they shake on it?

“Let’s go inside.” 

-

Each step towards his apartment felt like a death march--and Barba would know. He’d taken that route once before on long-gone real estate. 

He’d just as good as told Carisi his days were numbered up until and only when the younger man saw his youth from the rearview, and chose to get out and chase it with someone more his speed.

If that wasn't a metaphorical gun-to-the-head, Barba would eat the bullet he’d been promised. 

He certainly felt like he’d taken the Detective hostage, though Carisi played it better than Barba could have ever hoped to do, sparing a friendly word to the doorman while Barba, who’d somehow swung it so that Carisi led and he followed, did not so much as make eye contact. The man--an elderly gentleman--was always kindly and talkative, the latter bearing proof of his keen observation skills. He always recalled a late night, counting and summing them for Barba as if there was any forgotten the hours he worked. 

_That’s four this week, Mr. Barba._

_3am! A new record, Mr. Barba!_

And, _Welcome home, Mr. Barba. Mr. Carisi arrived a few hours earlier._

Of course, Barba couldn’t hold his tongue for long. He’d opened his mouth to speak the moment they stepped foot in the elevator. 

“I’m glad we’re out,” Barba said--a ready insistence. Carisi blinked in surprise; if Barba had to go so far back and unearth their basest victory, he worried how uneasy the man must feel now, sussing out their current situation. 

Barba continued, “It feels… principled.” 

_And good,_ he wanted to add. _Freeing,_ and just the side of radical he liked to play on. 

“But?” Carisi pressed, searching for a denial in all the absolutes Barba conjured up. 

Barba rolled his neck for a show of genuine discomfort. 

“I don’t feel the need to ask everyone’s opinion after the fact. And that’s exactly what bringing your family into this does.” 

They arrived at Barba’s floor, and he continued speak while Carisi trailed him warily. 

“It’s not unexpected--you’re close. You care what they have to say. But theirs isn’t an opinion you should take to heart. It’s confused. You think they’re only talking about you, and they think you understand they’re levying all these admonishments to some abstract concept.” _Or people like me,_ Barba thought privately. “Something you’ve _done,_ not something you _are.”_

Carisi crossed his arms and couldn’t keep the petulant pout from hanging itself on his face.

“Should I be taking notes on this lecture, Professor?” 

Barba ignored him in favor of the point he meant to make amidst all his proselytizing. All the best pastors and con men alike closed the deal with the promise of salvation, and lawyers were no different. 

“Coming out, telling people… it’s meant that _they_ listen.”

“So I did it wrong? That’s what you’re saying?”

Barba gave him a long, cool look. 

“N _o,_ ” he said, like it was obvious, and Carisi knew it was. “You tried. Sometimes that doesn’t do it.” 

He stopped, frowned. Carisi followed his gaze down the hall as if there was something to see in the dark carpet and bright walls. 

“I love you,” Barba said, his tone creeping towards icy, such that the sentiment began to sound like part of another argument. 

Maybe, Carisi thought, it was.

Except Barba relented just as fast, and his face went slack as he continued to stand, key in hand, eerily transfixed at his apartment door. He turned and--in an effort to meet Carisi’s request that they keep their fiercest arguments outside of the apartment--Barba said, “I know I make it sound like some huge grievance. I apologize. I have you here. There’s no reason for me to feel aggrieved.”

They entered Barba’s apartment, both standing there for a moment, uncertain, as if neither could ferret out meaning from Barba’s statements, and that much should set the tone. Nothing he’d said had the feel of a warm invitation, yet where they were was no accident. 

_Forget it,_ Carisi thought, and began to wriggle out of his coat, gloves, and scarf, putting them where they’d found a home at the very front of Barba’s hall closet. As for how embarrassing it would be to fetch them out again out from under Barba launching still more verbal rounds, Carisi tried his best not to consider that eventuality. Instead, he put on his best unbothered expression, a thing crafted to perfection early in his career. Senior officers always found satisfaction putting down the rookies, and Carisi had been a rookie several times over. 

For his own well-being--indeed, to simply get up and put himself through the ringer every day--he’d had to learn not to give people the satisfaction. 

Slowly, they moved and breathed as if all was normal, until they did not have to concentrate hard on making simple tasks appear as such. 

Carisi unbuttoned his shirt a ways, but hesitated taking it off. Rollins’ guess that the soft wool seafoam number was Barba’s doing wasn’t the greatest display of her gambling talents--it wouldn’t have won her any state fair jellybean counts, to be sure--but Carisi liked that there was ownership at play, here. He didn’t want to throw Barba off his back and return to his old ways; he wanted them to complement one another. 

_Like we do in bed,_ Carisi thought, and was surprised by his own shrewdness. A lump arrived in his throat to excuse the dryness of his tongue, which suddenly had all the consistency of sandpaper as he bit down on it to keep from voicing his suggestion. 

_See, I get that you’re in a bitchy mood. Wanna fuck?_

Now _there_ was a way to win an argument with Rafael Barba. 

Carisi decided instead to roll up his shirtsleeves, to make himself the picture of comfort and ease, but not to play that winning hand just yet. 

At least for now, he thought they both could do with a softer touch. 

Barba arrived at much the same conclusion, having racked up Carisi’s behaviors, and pegging the man as beginning his descent. Carisi wasn’t still upset; he was too quiet for that, literally biting his tongue as best Barba could see. 

If Barba was smart, he’d follow suit, and put anything else he had to say through a different means. He could give Carisi space or impress upon him his love. Either, he was certain, could be done without argument.

But he couldn’t relent. Biting his tongue would only sever it in an attempt then to speak through the obstacle, and he’d rather color his teeth in blood than missed opportunities. Keeping quiet against his instincts only ever ended one way: his sentiments would part his lips as a lie or worse, a promise. 

He closed the space between them, and Carisi was quick to accompany the man in his space. Barba smoothed his hands down Carisi’s partly-open shirtfront, resisting the urge to fix what had been mused. Carisi followed Barba’s hands and enclosed them in his own. They both moved slowly. 

Barba kissed Carisi, a thing less done with his mouth than tipping his head back and standing on his tiptoes. It was a very perfunctory effort, made simply because the thought of never being welcome to it again had found Barba hard and fast in the parking garage. 

It was a nice enough kiss, but Carisi wasn’t fooled. Besides opening his mouth to it, he gave little back. He still felt drained of his own resources; Barba had seen to that. 

“I’m sorry,” Barba said. He was staring at the peak of white undershirt showing between the split of wool and seafoam. “For all of it. For doubting you, for falling short, for being stubborn.”

Barba could only imagine the look on his face: eyes tired hugged by dark and heavy eyelids, but that much more wide for being open at all. 

Quietly now, Carisi ruminated after all that had been said and done. 

“I don’t know where you got this idea that I never have--or never will--accept getting anything less than exactly what I want. Or that I don’t already have more than I ever hoped I would.” 

Barba’s eyes drew shut. 

He took two steps back, and still Carisi held his hands. Barba resisted, tugging as Carisi first squeezed, but like they both knew he would, Carisi let him go. 

“I’m saying, you deserve that much. More.”

For being empty-handed, Carisi sounded still more full of righteous anger, the likes of which Barba knew was more deserved than not. 

“People telling me what I should want or hope to have… really, Raf? That doesn’t ring a bell?” He smothered that instinct, and went for _pliable, pleasing Carisi_ once more. His demands were read for pleads for mercy, and neither was preferable to the other. “It’s not your call, either.” 

“I’m getting _everything,_ ” Barba implored. Any wonderment the sentiment once held was now replaced with suspicion for having so much, and fear of losing it all. “Chalk it up to senseless idealism or a childhood of poverty. I don’t think any relationship should be so unevenly stacked.”

“Jesus, Raf, I’m not left wanting for anything over here.” Carisi said, and the sentiment carried on with a bout of weak, empty laughter. “Is that how I come off? What am I doing-- _where_ are you getting this?”

He shook his head, dumbfounded. The search for answers was exhausting, and worse--he got the distinct feeling Barba was simply hiding them behind his back. If Carisi didn’t trust Barba’s judgment like he did, he’d have lifted his head and taken a peek long ago. 

Instead, he stood still as stone, and waited for Barba to reveal himself. 

Barba, who wanted to do nothing of the sort, first busied his hands smoothing his shirt, straightening his cuffs, and then ruining the work by folding his arms tightly across his chest.

“You look happy,” Barba said, and by his harried tone Carisi knew he saw himself for giving something up. “When you talk about your family, or spend time with Jesse or Noah.”

Softly, Carisi insisted: “I’m happiest when I’m with you.”

He ached when he saw how easy it was for Barba to wrinkle his nose and ignore him.

“I see that and I think…” Barba’s gaze hardened as he stared into some far-off place that, in its entirety, must have been contained in the crook of Carisi’s elbow. “What a waste. That he's with me. Because, any other man? You could charm into a litter of children. I'm sure of it.” 

Again, Carisi felt he’d brought some threads of this line of defensive posturing on himself, or at least--he’d drawn Barba closer to thinking it was plausible. His inability to stave off his family’s invasive efforts had left lasting damage. Between them, something had broken, and Barba was tending to the phantom pains fixed along those slow-to-mend fractures. 

“I don't _want_ any other man. And can you just--stop for a second? Because I know you don't get this down on yourself, like, _ever._ So this is about me. What you think of me.”

“Yes,” Barba concluded snippily. “What I think of you, as informed by what you say and do.” 

“Well,” Carisi started, a near-shout and frayed besides, “I’m sorry! Okay? _I’m sorry._ I’m not the Prince of Subtlety, I look at and acknowledge things, you included. You most of all. The fuck is wrong with me, right? _I’m sorry._ ”

It startled them both: the desperation filling the room like a thick smoke, choking off any and all other efforts to alert themselves to an escape. Carisi felt his face flush red with shame; Barba was a cooler customer than most, but bristled at the antics of others, and Carisi knew slinging his accent around like a firearm didn’t help matters. He didn’t like the look Barba spared the uninspired.

Mostly, he looked near to saying--not asking--a wry, _Are you shouting at me?_

The outburst and the silence were both impositions. Carisi bit his lip to stave off another of the former, but found no better answer than waiting through the latter. 

To his shock, Barba soon looked similarly ashamed, like he saw himself as an equal partner in Carisi’s display. The realization arrived slowly, but once it settled it was there to stay.

“Wanting what you do… and holding out for it…” Barba spoke carefully, unearthing the right words out from under the hurt pride and abiding heartache, both spread like heavy layers over the love that hummed below, that shook him from his very core. 

“That’s admirable. And it’s basics. I _know_ you know that.” 

The hard gleam in Barba’s eye might have returned--were he in court, sticking his final point like a bayonet, it would have--but here and now, Barba was unable to summon it. He only looked tired, and sorry besides. 

“So why can’t you admit it?”

“It’s never been this hard before,” Carisi said, a near-whisper as the thought finally-- _finally_ \--left him. It wasn’t disappointment that dug into his relationship with Barba, but fear. Fear of whether they lasted or not, and what came of it all. Fear that Carisi would have to set aside dreams--his only constant in a life played on the rails of others’ expectations--if he meant to keep this one charming reality. 

“Well,” Barba reasoned, “Such is the nature of a choice.” 

And Barba couldn’t fault him for his hesitation; by dating women--people he never quite felt drawn to--Carisi was detached from such thinking. The element of determination was lost to the overwhelming fantasy of it all, even if that fantasy was the idea of _necessity._

And now, for feeling something real, Carisi had to contend with probable outcomes. 

In hearing Barba recognize this much, Carisi let out a shaking breath. Relief, if one was so generous with the term. Carisi felt like his soul was creeping out and emptying into thin air.

He was with a man he loved, yet he’d spent so long wanting only the rest--all the familiar trappings to make up for what stood well apart from his norm--that what was once impossible felt that way again, even for having it--fully, bodily--in his grasp. 

If only he could reach out and touch Barba, graze his fingertips against warm skin, press his palm flat into awaiting flesh, perhaps his choice would be made for him. 

It drove Carisi to distraction: from having nothing and wanting just a taste, how could he come around again to losing everything he had in service to what he wanted? 

“I can give you this.” Barba spoke quietly, even shades towards fearful. With only a furtive glance, he indicated his home, his companionship, the good and the bad in both. 

This was _all_ he could give. 

“We can live together, share our time and our lives…” 

These promises, once the grand, glittering beacons on the hill of their budding relationship, now felt gossamer-thin. Barba worried if, in just speak their praises, he’d break apart their wondrous hold on Carisi. He seemed tethered to Barba’s side in the hopes of one day cashing in on those promises, and advancing onto some new plane of being. 

A place where he could meld what he wanted with all he’d ever known, and come out clean on the other side. 

“But that’s it.” 

And, “You need to decide if that's enough.”

And, “It really is okay if it's not. In the greater scheme of things. I promise.”

That was what Barba feared most: that his offerings would be uncovered for paltry, and Carisi would feel underserved by their presentation. With his home, his career, his tastes--Barba had once considered himself quite the catch. It was strange, now, to think a lanky cop from Staten Island would alone dissuade him of that illusion. 

It was stranger still that Barba knew he had it in him to ask again and again and again, to pine forever for acceptance, to hope to receive from Carisi an allotment of his own presence. 

Carisi was used to Barba dismissing the very notion of erstwhile dreams, instead making his own case for belonging. This quiet, earnest effort wasn’t so much the show that first caught Carisi’s eye, but now, he couldn’t look away. Even blinking, he thought, would be a blaspheme against this holy order: Barba, bearing his heart, and asking on its behalf, _Carisi._

Carisi dragged a hand over his face, through his hair, down the sweat-spotted back of his neck. He often spoke with his hands, so Carisi wondered if he was being too obvious here. 

_Don’t look at me. I don’t know._

They were stood so far apart. 

“You always want to tell me when I’m wrong, but you never lay me with any of the blame.” Carisi tried to speak the words slowly and without a hint towards blame. “That’s weird, you get that, right? I can take it.”

“You do,” Barba said, equally as non-committal. “I just want to be an asshole.”

“Oh, well, there’s a banner on an airship carrier I’d like you to see…” 

As both men stood in audience to these strange, half-spoken apologies, Barba cracked the first smile, forgetting for a moment how monumentally sorry he felt. There was a physical sickness manifesting in his gut--a response to Carisi being altogether too much for Barba to stomach.

Carisi, reading the look on Barba’s face, the shift in his posture from stringent to wary, likewise felt uneasy. Here was a great man brought to his knees by the heaviness in his heart, a thing Carisi hadn’t put there, but surely had a hand on, weighing it down. 

Carisi took a breath, summoning back what had left him. 

He teased lightly, “I can get it notarized, if you want. ‘I want this.’ ‘I am happy.’”

Carisi settled on first truths, even if the rest was still lost to him, and scarier still for not knowing. 

“You know what you are to me, right?” 

Worrying both his hands and expression, Carisi approached the fact with some unintentional pomp and circumstance--enough, anyway, to pique Barba’s interest and quicken his heart rate. 

(Which was, in itself, a beautiful sight: Barba’s green eyes widened and stuck to their target, while his lips parted in preparation of a comeback. If someone was going to tell him what he was, Barba was sure to have something to say about that.) 

“And you didn’t sign up for this, I know, but… my first love. The first--the _only_ \--time I’ve felt like I’ve got skin in this fight. Like if you left me, I’d bleed out. Slowly. I’d die.”

Carisi’s tone marked it heartfelt, while Barba’s reaction read only as egregious. That he should have to know for certain what he’d only suspected--or, in his worst, most self-possessed moments, dared to hope--was too great an imposition. 

Within 1 Hogan Place, there was already an informal inquest on the matter of his humility--and here, without a thought to the consequences, Carisi delivered its deathblow?

Carisi watched Barba swallow down the ire in his expression, then roll his eyes at the whole display, though not unkindly.

“Come on,” he said, softer than seemed possible, softer--certainly--than what was intended. 

There was some victory to be claimed in that. 

The argument, Carisi knew, was dead. Barba wouldn't lob kind offerings from a distance; he would step over its corpse, close the space. 

“I mean it,” Carisi said. His mouth felt dry and desolate, as if he’d held these words hostage for a thousand years. Now his teeth and tongue were the sole purveyor of the space, hawking it to new secrets and heartfelt confessions.

“I’ve been a… passive participant in my own life for a really long time.” Carisi convinced himself he didn’t _need_ to tell Barba the particulars, that he understood, but mostly, Carisi was loathe to hear his own admission: that doing what he thought was prudent to excuse himself from choosing all the things that would fundamentally change who he was had suited him just fine for years. 

He swallowed down the admission and found it still went down smoothly enough that he didn’t choke.

“Not anymore.”

Barba looked down and away; he could not bring himself to stare, curious, at a man who would say such a thing. In that moment, Carisi was no better than a circus sideshow-- _behold, the man with his heart in his hands!_ \--and Barba worried he’d either find cause to disbelieve, or be struck by his unnatural existence. 

“When we started this--when _I_ started this,” Barba fended off Carisi’s objection with a loose, sad smile that hung under his nose like a bad smell. “And I did. Asking you to my apartment.” 

_Staring at you,_ Barba added silently, and the list kept growing: _Wanting you. Never saying so. Playing like it was all you’d ever wanted, and I was just **bored.**_

“I wanted to be asked,” Carisi interrupted, sharp and clear as church bells.

Barba held his breath for a moment, but did not spend it on an argument. He went on as he meant to, saying, “I didn’t consider that it might continue. I didn’t consider _you_ in the slightest. I was thinking only of my own survival, and what I needed to feel in order to wake up and face each day.” 

He scrubbed his face, feeling along his jaw like the words were stalled there, bitten down on and held in. 

“It took me far too long to recognize my mistake.”

Finally, Carisi showed a little honest-to-goodness intrigue. Barba apologized with some frequency--now, more than before--but an admission of fault was a different matter entirely, a rare bird if ever Carisi was to see one shooting across the sky. 

“Oh, yeah?”

But Barba disappointed him, delivering his response in the quiet, sure tone of yet another apology. 

“I could have had you so much longer.” 

His eyes shone with a real determination, and Carisi was won back at once. He shifted where he stood, took each of Barba’s hands in his own, and closed the space between them. Barba withheld, but only for the sake of his ego. Already bruised--unintentionally and not, but Carisi and his own self, respectively--Barba meant to beef the thing up with a little hard fought reticence. 

But _ease,_ he decided in the moment he sank into Carisi’s pull, _ease was more daring._

“I think,” Carisi started slow, and touched on the words only as they came to him, as if put to his lips by a prophet, “I think when you thought about your own survival, you thought about me. And maybe you knew we needed each other.”

Barba smirked, and Carisi didn't mind it. The gesture made the man look happy.

“That’s generous,” Barba tutted. He liked the feeling of Carisi’s fingers interwoven among his own, and though his words were short and his tone clipped, he did not wish to hasten their parting. 

“You said you weren’t thinking about how it could continue,” Carisi pointed out. “Seems to me you didn’t think about how it would end, neither.”

“I suppose not,” Barba allowed, but remained wary of Carisi’s cheerier outlook. “But you have to admit--this? You? Dating an older colleague? Someone… far removed from your own interests?” Barba teased distance, but Carisi held him steadfast. “Maybe you should give a thought to survival, yourself.”

At once, Carisi seemed to take his advice. He inched back and looked at Barba in his entirety (a thing he could do not because Barba was so small a figure--physically or otherwise--but because Carisi’s height and thoughtful distance allowed it) and then, with the slow ruminations of the predestined, Carisi parted his hands from Barba’s. Emptiness and cold rushed to meet them, but Carisi moved only to service their place on Barba’s face, where he braced the man by the cheeks and took back his stolen kiss.

Barba’s steel jaw relaxed under his touch, and Carisi felt the muscles constrict into a shape more open to him with just the first brush of his fingertips. He went for another, testing that what he felt was real and beyond that--welcome.

Barba’s attitude didn't make him uncertain; the realities he clung to and referenced in his arguments did that. Dismissing fact in lieu of what was expedient was something Carisi had done throughout his youth, internally, and because he knew Barba came into the habit as an adult, Carisi wondered if he’d ever truly grow out of it. 

Self-delusion in service to one's own survival was a tool neither man should need to wield anymore, now that they could watch one another's backs.

“If convention mattered to me that much, Raf, I wouldn’t be here.” Of this, Carisi was certain. “If I was imitating something, trying to figure this out… I wouldn’t know where to look. I can’t find anyone like you.” 

Barba kissed him, long, thoroughly, with the addition of a hand groping for hot flesh, which found a home at the back of Carisi’s neck. The move was necessary, but not charged. Barba kissed as though there was still a point to be made, and did not take his efforts further. He drew away, but could not commit to a full and resounding departure. 

Barba rested his forehead against Carisi’s chest and let the other man’s hot breaths disrupt his tidy hair. Comfort spilled like a fever over his brow. The hurt he’d felt still charged through him, burning down his legs and searing his parting lips, but no more did it make contact with his heart. 

“You really mean the crazy shit you say when you say it, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Always.” Carisi let both his hands meet behind Barba’s back, where they looped easily to draw him in and keep him close. “I’ve got no regrets about that.”

“None?” Barba said against Carisi’s chest, and did not allow himself to feel silly for the scratch of fabric on his words. He liked the figure Carisi cut, the long legs holding up a body that supported him. 

“Really?” He pulled back just enough to let Carisi see the suspicion play over his face. “Let’s expand those parameters, some.” 

When Carisi didn’t answer, and Barba stepped away, Carisi wondered if it was out of spite, or if Barba really did want the coffee he moved to fix for himself. 

“Okay, there is one,” Carisi allowed, and kept his gaze on Barba as the man opened the cupboard to retrieve a second mug.

(Spite, then.)

Carisi sank into the barstool positioned on the opposite side of the counter. It was just as well that he felt like spilling his woes to a man working for tips. 

“Used to be, I’d donate blood. I’m O+ so it’s worth it, you know? I used to go to the same clinic, and everybody knew me. I don’t even remember them asking, ever, if…” Carisi fell silent, and for a moment, the only sound in the apartment was the gentle drip of the coffee machine. “Until this new intake nurse was rattling off the questions, and…” The rest--obvious and ugly though it was--Carisi thought, if he didn’t say so out loud, Barba wouldn’t have to bear it with him. “That was over a year ago, and I haven’t been back since.”

Carisi accepted the cup of coffee that was handed to him--a generous helping of milk spiraling through the supposed chocolate notes Barba claimed existed, nevermind palatable. 

“It’s just those reminders, you know? That this isn’t just something I’m doing, it’s who I am. And somehow, that changes things for me.” 

Barba nodded and opened his mouth, hoping to sate Carisi’s bruised ego with a few words of understanding. He didn’t get the chance.

_“Also--”_

“Oh, good, I’ve opened the floodgates. Go ahead, get it all out.”

“--I don’t like that I can’t testify for you in court anymore. Because, man, that view from the box? Lookin’ at you, watching you work… there’s nothing like it.” 

Carisi waggled his eyebrows, and watched--delightedly--as barba rolled his eyes again. He felt like they had come down from their argument, and were taking small steps to secure a soft landing.

“It’s for the best. I wouldn’t win any cases if the jury saw you smiling at me like that. They’d think the fix was in.”

“With you prosecuting? It always is.”

“Allegations of professional misconduct don’t flatter nearly as much as you’d think.”

“They do alright,” Carisi said, laying his free hand over Barba’s where it laid flat on the counter. He toyed with Barba’s fingers, the knuckles slightly cracked from the cold, the soft palm underneath.

“I’m sorry,” he said, running his index along Barba’s ring finger, hoping he conveyed something like a promise.

“Don’t--”

“Then what do I say?” 

“There’s nothing that needs to be said. We understand each other.” Barba gripped Carisi’s hand when, before, he’d only been a silent partner in the exchange, resting limp and waiting. 

“We need to get tougher. That’s all.”

Something in that idea flickered like fear across Carisi’s face. Foolishly, he’d expected a return to their easy, happy norm. That they should needle one another, push and shove for all eternity, was no brighter an outcome than the inevitable breakup Barba anticipated. 

But--there was the implication of time in Barba’s words, so Carisi fixated on that, breathing it in like the hope he was starved for. 

He smiled sweetly, and earned himself a look of contentment in return. And on Barba, that look was as good as gold. 

With a parting squeeze, Barba disappeared into the bedroom, and came back with a black garment bag held aloft with one hand, and laid gently over his opposite forearm.

“Sit,” he said. Carisi sat on the couch, and Barba circled around so that he could slide his arms over Carisi’s shoulders and plant kisses along the man’s neck, ear, and cheek. He paid special attention to a smattering of freckles resting high on Carisi’s cheekbone, upon which they were perfectly placed, and nothing like the accidents of fortune suffered by others. 

Despite the unease that led them to this point, Carisi was giddy with the turn, which felt like the revelatory second act of a drama that held all his big scenes. 

Barba laid a garment bag over Carisi’s lap. 

“Christmas present” was the explanation tacked onto a whisper-soft press of his lips to the back of Carisi’s head. 

“The books--?”

Barba gave him a flat look. 

“A clever ruse,” he said. “Apparently.”

The smile that never quite lifted up to meet Barba was nonetheless splendid: a serene vision, like a dingy just keeping afloat amidst a storm, and pulling safely into harbor. 

“I liked the books,” Carisi said softly. 

“You can keep the books.”

Carisi smoothed the garment bag over his lap, toyed with the hanger protruding from its end before unzipping it. 

Laughter, warm as summer, buzzed through him. Barba felt drawn to it, so he circled the couch to join Carisi and bathe in his light. 

“You got me a suit,” Carisi said, his voice a tittering mess. “A _green_ suit.”

“Too much?” Barba asked, suddenly very--and needlessly--anxious, despite the charmed expression on Carisi’s face. 

He’d already considered that possibility, concluding at last that the green was blue enough, and what really would account for it being eye-catching was the fit, cut, and wearer. Barba didn’t think this deeply about his own fashion choices; he wore what he liked, nevermind thoughts towards impropriety. But Carisi had a different audience, so Barba’s considerations were these: what would Carisi care to be seen in? Would he don whatever smart look was availed to him, or shy away at the implication it was chosen by another’s hand and eye, and meant to please?

Carisi laughed again--seemingly, Barba believed, at his own overwrought thinking. It was full-bellied and coupled with the man bringing a hand to cover his mouth. 

_“Yes.”_ The hand relieved itself, and the smile hiding behind it was small and deeply held. “But I love it. Thank you.” 

He didn’t kiss Barba, but turned and stared, looking over and into this man, as if he hoped to spy where it was he hid the kindness within him, which suddenly was on such vibrant display. Barba, certain he was being searched, stood and retreated to the kitchen for his coffee. 

Carisi pulled more than the shoulders out to see the long, slim cut in all its glory. 

“It really is something else,” he murmured when Barba had returned, coffee in hand, poised at his lips.

“Mm. Consider it an investment.” Barba produced a smirk heady with confidence. “I didn’t get this suit just to see you walk away from me in it.” 

“I don’t plan on walking away.” Sincerity was Carisi’s go-to, but he wasn’t so blushing a figure that he didn’t catch Barba’s meaning. He delighted in it. “Any guy who could pull me off you better have, like, a speed boat.” 

“I’ll make a note of it.”

“Two speed boats.”

Barba went soft, quiet--the two went hand-in-hand for him. He breathed a contented sigh, though Carisi doubted the rousing success of his surprise gift meant so much as to draw Barba’s eyes halfway closed and put such a sweet smile against his lips. Rather, he saw Barba for someone who had cleared a few hurdles, and come away unscathed. 

The relief might have calmed Carisi, too, if he did not know for a fact that Rafael Barba never saw his path as a straight shot. It scarcely mattered whether or not he anticipated an awful set of circumstances--if he could just _imagine_ them, he’d ready his defenses. 

The battalions were always in place. Barba merely had to give the signal.

Carisi wondered if he couldn’t cross the battlefield and call a truce. 

He set the suit aside, first zipping it back into its protective garment bag and laying it smoothly over the spreach of couch to his left. 

“I’m going to want things, sometimes. Usually from myself.” Carisi dipped his head some and searched until he caught Barba’s gaze. “You gotta know that I’ll never lose sight of what I _have.”_

“A real _Little House on the Prairie_ earnestness, for one,” Barba replied, sounding eerily calm. 

Maybe, Carisi thought, Barba was just tired of the back-and-forth. 

Or maybe, he’d given up the game entirely.

“Yeah, that. And a great head of hair. And you.” 

_God,_ Carisi thought, a desperate prayer as Barba shifted, then inched himself closer.

_Stand down. Stand down._

Barba kissed him again, this time refusing to break contact even as he rearranged their bodies, angling them towards a new end. He drew his partner into his lap, and if Barba wasn’t infinitely pleased for the fast parting of Carisi’s legs, that fact became very apparent. 

He was hard, and Carisi laughed at the pressure he felt building under his ass.

“That had better hit your funny bone…” Barba muttered, mouth still on Carisi’s, or at least in its general vicinity. Carisi did not stall him with his free hands or kiss-slick lips, and as Barba searched Carisi’s throat and jaw for objections, he found none. 

Carisi laughed still more brightly. Unable to bring himself to smother the brilliant smile left in the laughter’s wake, Barba nipped at Carisi’s throat.

“I’m just remembering how long you waited for me to wanna…” 

“Fuck?” Barba groaned. “That’s no laughing matter.” 

He was beginning to ache, which made him fussy. 

“Christ,” he said, nothing like the prayer Carisi made it out to be. From Barba’s mouth, the name was an ancient curse. “You looked so mortified when I first brought it up. I resumed my long-term relationship with a dildo and you perfected the blowjob.” 

Carisi ducked his head in shame. “I still feel bad about that.”

“Don’t. It’s a marketable skill.” Barba smirked and watched Carisi’s hands tackle Barba’s slacks, then maneuver over the fly of his own jeans. “Or do you mean the persistent lockjaw--?”

“Asshole,” Carisi grumbled, his eye on Barba while thumbing along the waist of the man’s boxer-briefs. 

“--Because there are exercises you can--”

_“Asshole.”_ Carisi wanted to sound stringent, but he was feeling far too warm and wild and a strange sense of overjoyed for that level of discipline. 

“I wanted to,” he said, undeterred from his point. “I just… thought if you did it, I’d have to reciprocate, and I wasn’t…” 

There was such desperation there, saturated deep into even the memory of his behavior and clinging to the last of his words as he struggled to line them up. It made Barba sick to think those feelings kept so tight a grip on his heart, and hadn’t long passed. He wanted to believe Carisi troubled through that illness and became immune, later, with both experience and interest feeding one another. 

The ache in Barba’s cock suddenly disgusted him as he searched for the right words to cure Carisi of his disillusionment. 

He found he only had pity, which--coupled with the warm wet taste of Carisi in his mouth--was unseemly dripping from his tongue. Barba wished it could swallow it back down.

“Your unchecked need to please others is alarming, to say the least.” 

Carisi, somehow, summoned up a smile. 

He either wasn’t as hurt as he sounded, or he had dug a place deep enough inside himself to store those memories, and when deposited there, Carisi could look as happy as if he never knew those things about himself. 

And his hands didn’t lose their place on Barba’s middle. 

“Thanks for waiting me out, is what I’m saying.”

“Waste no blowjob. That’s on my family crest.” 

Carisi chewed at his grin, keeping it between his teeth and--by that logic--out of sight. But Barba saw him, of course. Sat in his lap like a treat, there was little Carisi could keep from his partner, least of all any physical reaction to being pulled there, and alternatively rocked and steadied. 

“Look at you,” Barba murmured. The red rising to the man’s cheeks, the delight he wore so heavily on his features that it could narrow and hold the blue in his eyes, yet throw stars there, too, as if even the slightest of pathways should be opened for entire galaxies to fill. 

“Look at _you._ ”

Carisi punctuated his point by undoing a button on Barba’s shirt--a brazen display that firmed up Carisi’s sentiment. 

_And here’s a little more to see._

Barba gave a sidelong smirk. He couldn’t see himself, but he could gage the picture he made--open shirt, ready mouth, and dead-set gaze--by Carisi’s reaction. The unrest in the man’s eyes alone gave no small boost to Barba’s ego; there wasn’t any part of him Carisi wasn’t gamely taking in. 

“You’ve talked me into a frenzy.” 

Carisi didn’t know if _that_ was true. Barba was still speaking in complete sentences, after all. 

“You wanna fuck me?” 

To send his partner careening over that final threshold, Carisi adopted a combination of stillness, poise--and, to undo Barba completely--total assurance. As soon as the words parted his lips, Carisi felt Barba’s response between the split of his ass. The greater victory was the quiver in Barba’s jaw as he resisted the urge to answer outright--any litany of _yes_ and _please_ that would be both their undoing. 

“How about a beej, for old time’s sake?” Carisi asked, and laughed outright when Barba all but hoisted him up, as if intent on carrying Carisi to the bedroom. It wasn’t a thing Barba’s back--much less Carisi’s height--would allow, though Carisi much appreciated the sentiment. 

“Don’t you _dare.”_

\- 

Secured in the willful embrace of another man, Barba found himself arriving at a sense of peace he’d scarcely known in life, save for those quiet moments chasing their daunting successors. 

Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, cradling a broken wrist for when his mother returned home, and in the meantime letting his bloody nose exhaust itself down the drain. A moment of solitude amidst a crowd as he graduated Harvard Law, his the only browned face in attendance. 

Ascending the Brooklyn courthouse steps with his head held high after a win. 

Sitting alone in a courtroom after his first loss. 

Those moments were his to relish in and reflect on, but more than that--they were a part of a scarce collection. He knew himself--fully--in those moments. Barba arranged himself in a world as a man who did not give up, one who fought even those losing battles. He’d arrived as a boy who would not cry in desperation.

And here he was, seeing himself in his entirety once more, as a man who could love. 

Barba realized this was what he could not bear to lose, and it was all his protestations that clinched it. The anger, fear, and loathing. The eager forgiveness. All were an expression of his love. 

Carisi hummed happily, blissfully, against Barba’s ear. 

Barba had just had Carisi--been over him, in him--but it was Carisi who sought to bring them that much closer, to embrace in totality after Barba was spent and Carisi was shaken with the effort. He was the one to conform his body, to curl and meet all of Barba and embrace him gladly and kindly, to press a loving smattering of kisses across his shoulders, like the full and aching man should first issue his thanks to the one who filled him. 

Barba quieted his thoughts. There was nothing curious about the arrangement; in fact, Barba realized _he’d started it._ Since their first time, Barba had been the one to embrace Carisi after, to show him he was pleased, relaxed, and unharmed. 

They’d done it ever since, and Barba simply hadn’t noticed anything improper--let alone different--than the afterglow of sex with any man he’d enjoyed sleeping with, previously. Men who’d thought, rightly or wrongly, that their partner needed to be physically held together after a show of force such as their own. Barba and Carisi both had their moments, but breaking one another apart like wrestlers in the ring wasn’t their venue. They’d rather commit to that aching, exhaustive attempt always coming shy of unwitting destruction. 

Barba didn’t want to go back to the exchanges he’d had with other men, where intention had some degree of uncertainty, which was exciting, but taxing to maintain. Even an ample give-and-take mentality--egalitarianism at its best--felt trite compared to what he and Carisi shared. 

Barba could have laughed at that, the grandiose interpretation of what had been--though _delightful_ \--a needy rut after a painful argument. And still… 

The assurance in Carisi’s embrace, the tenderness in his kisses, and their placement atop individual freckles were not coincidence. 

Barba did not want to give this up--hadn’t, really, since he got it into his head Carisi wasn’t, on his own, hedging his bets. Barba surprised himself wanting exactly _that._ He’d only ever felt he was infinitely wrong for it, and for lack of rectifying his feelings, Barba had sought only to rectify the situation, to needle it into ruin.

A better man might have taken up the challenge; a moral man would have denied it an audience. Barba straddled the line between what was good and just, and for whom. 

He sighed, and let Carisi’s hold replace the breath he’d lost. It was a fair trade.

-

Consciousness accosted Barba directly, landing like a body on pavement--though not his own, for as often as he dreamed it. 

He was struck by the realization that he’d been asleep at all, and comfortably so, with his arm thrown over his eyes and the sheets pulled around him. He squinted at the clock and figured he couldn't have stolen more than half an hour.

And yet Barba felt an entire year sweep through him, lost. 

“I don’t do this often, do I?” 

Carisi, who was very well awake and scrolling through the contents of his phone, patted Barba’s errant arm pitiably. 

“Who’s counting?”

“Christ, I’m old.” 

He started to untangle himself from the sheets, and otherwise assume some sense of his dignity: a hand to smooth his mussed hair, another to wipe at the drool cooling on his lower lip.

“No,” Carisi insisted, distressed, as if Barba had done so much as to don a suit and tie. “Stay in bed.”

Barba continued until he was sitting up, with one leg creeping out to touch warm toes to the cold floor. 

“I’ll fall asleep. Again.”

“I’ll keep you stimulated.” 

Carisi dropped his voice to say so. Instead of his usual far-flung account, words bouncing about like he was perpetually shouting from across an expressway, he’d produced something more akin to a _purr,_ and it was beyond filthy. The velvet in his voice a thing of incomprehensible wonder. How did an accent that so ruthlessly mutilated the English language do _that_ to every nerve ending in Barba’s possession? 

The voice had company in Carisi’s hand. His fingers were warm and splayed as they drew up from Barba’s knee to his thigh, reaching his ass and digging in. 

He tested and teased the flesh so thoroughly that Barba was certain he meant to go forth, to extend a finger or two or three, and undo Barba from within. But the pressure never tipped towards uncomfortable, and Barba soon realized he was being fondled, not toyed with. Coming off of pins and needles, Barba sank fitfully into a two-handed, and mouthy affair as Carisi kissed, nipped, sucked, and massaged his thighs. Barba gave a startled laugh when Carisi hoisted up Barba’s left leg to better kiss its soft underside. 

“You’re too easy,” Carisi teased when Barba couldn’t bite back a impatient whine. 

“This is elder abuse. You’re keeping me from my nap with this… cruel… and unusual punishment.” 

“Just want you with me, is all.”

“Try some stimulating conversation, then,” Barba advised dryly. “Can’t be any worse than you mauling my leg.” 

Even as he said it, Barba knew he was still flushed pink and dotted with sweat. That Carisi watched him speak from over Barba’s own heaving torso didn’t help matters any. 

“You love it.”

Barba brought Carisi back to eye-level--and down to earth--with a few well-meaning tugs of his arm. He much rathered Carisi fit against his side than lost to him, even by three feet of space.

“I love… that we’re having regular sex. It means I don't have to go for runs anymore.” 

The rest of their day disappeared under a mix of limbs and bedsheets, weak sunlight and mumbled apologies spilled between thighs and rolled over bare backs. First considered, leaving the bed punctured the soul, a powerful blaspheme among ardent believers. But Barba willed himself to the task, and ultimately felt like waking up again to a new day, one rife with opportunity. 

For Barba, who had only stepped aside to bring something more to their little scene, the opportunity to return was doubly triumphant. 

Music snaked through open doors and spread legs alike, sounds both new and old, from the painstakingly-hunted vinyls Carisi tracked down for Barba, and had insisted he have earlier that morning. Barba had been very pleased to receive the records--excited, too, because the preserved sleeves showed both time and care, and the origins were as far-flung as Italy and as near to his heart as Cuba. 

And despite their argument and all the uncertain lessons shared, Barba found himself unconcerned with the music as he spoke, tender and soft, like he was taking his cues from Carisi himself, the bed, the dull light. 

“I love you… so much. To the extent I really should know better.”

Saying so sparked something. Carisi huffed a breath of laughter at the twisted absurdity of the statement, but it stayed with him, and he internalized it, and he wondered…

“What would you even want from a marriage?” 

Carisi posited the question with all the curiosity that had chased round and round his head as he’d put his hands and mouth and intentions towards more pressing matters. In this lull, he found himself coming back to that idling thought: what would he have, if he could have it all?

Barba, for his part, chose to answer carefully. Carisi knew as much as the man stalled for time by kissing the nearest limb--Carisi’s limb--and using the space between them for leverage enough to make his first point.

Barba bucked against Carisi’s naked side and said, “You really are one of those procreate-or-bust Catholics, aren’t you?” 

“I’m not asking that,” Carisi huffed, and turned over so that Barba had to face him. “You can give a generic answer. What would you want from a marriage?” 

“From a relationship that resulted in marriage, or…?” 

“Just the thing itself. Alone on an island. _Marriage._ Define.”

Barba rolled his eyes. Carisi played this game often enough that Barba didn’t need to be on the other side of the two-way glass to see its happening. He’d start with simple demands, then with a little twisting and idling talk, sure enough he’d demand those deepest, darkest truths. 

For his own, Barba could get into the theoretical. Marriage had long inhabited those parameters, feeling out-of-bounds for him, despite court rulings and changing public opinion.

“Not bliss…” Barba started, deciding it was best to manage Carisi’s expectations and work backwards. “Not routine, really. Honesty is… hoped for. I suppose I’d want the… reasonable expectation… of care.” 

Carisi sat up on his elbows and served Barba a flat look. 

“A _reasonable expectation_ of care? Really?” 

“For extended periods of time, even. Too much?”

_“You’re_ too much.” Carisi muttered, meaning it in full. “You sound like you’re describing a low-end retirement facility.” 

“Marriage in a nutshell,” Barba said, bitterly, as if he had examples enough in his own life when, truthfully, he'd never seen a marriage both lasting and successful. “Ideally, we get old, get feeble, lose our faculties, and it's a race to the finish line.” 

Seeing Carisi sink, saddened by that, Barba threw his weight around a little, rolling into Carisi with more than just a well-placed nudge. 

“That was a joke. Lighten up.” 

Carisi moved up, onto Barba’s real estate, then encroached on the man himself, and though Barba’s arms went out to steady him there, he smiled wanly and thought, _Here it comes._

“What do you think I’d want?”

“Is that a trick question?” 

“I’m giving you permission--just this once--to put words in my mouth.”

“Just words?” Barba asked, and had the nerve to look the picture of innocence as he did. His eyes were bright and open, his smile small and bare. He hadn't shaved that morning, and there was better proof of it now, in the grey bristles that braced each cheek. 

Carisi dropped theatrically back into bed, as if Barba’s smart mouth only ever ran to exhaust _him._

“Alright. Excluding the sun, moon, and the tides… you probably want love. To keep it in the theme of profound cosmic forces.”

Carisi considered it. “Yeah, that works. Because I think honesty and trust and _care_ are expressions of love.” He watched for that telltale wrinkle in Barba's brow, and when he saw it twitch into form, Carisi accused, “You don’t agree.”

“Honesty, trust… I don’t expect that of anyone. Not completely. Certainly not without threat of subpoena and contempt.” Moving again so that he was laid flat on his back, with Carisi cowed around him, Barba looked at the dove grey of his ceiling. “It’s not in your best interests to cede every shred of yourself for someone else’s benefit.”

“I trust you,” Carisi said.

“I know. You’re very foolish to do so.”

“You trust me, too,” Carisi insisted, and Barba found it difficult to look him in the eye when Carisi inched further atop of him. “Or you wouldn’t have been upset at all.” 

It was a damning counterpunch, and even for bracing for it, Barba felt its full force. 

“Am I right?”

Barba very nearly opened his mouth to comment on Carisi’s hypocrisy: _You trust me,_ he wanted to say, _And worse--you know me. If you ask again about children, you know you’ll get my honest answer. So you lie to yourself about its importance to you to stomach my disregard._

“More often than you think.” 

With a soft humming sound that belied the absolute certainty that guided his hand, Barba touched Carisi’s face, and held there, palm to cheek, because some switch had been flipped in Barba’s mind to necessitate it. Carisi stared, blue-eyes blinking back sudden awe at the gentleness he’d been afforded, and the way it sank his entire heart. 

Barba swept the hair from Carisi’s brow, moving all the while with focus enough to break Carisi down to the cellular level.

He felt a dull kind of hurt for making this man feel like Barba doubted him. Barba didn’t; he believed wholeheartedly that Carisi would make mistakes with the total confidence of the self-assured. Carisi’s problem was, he’d never again dare to question his own heart when deciding what was best for his soul. 

That task fell to Barba. 

For his own trouble, Barba felt like a habitual drowning victim, drawn to the ocean, and purposefully submerging himself into its deepest parts.

“I _adore_ you.”

The words floated out into existence, as if Barba need not exert the energy even to say them. They simply appeared, righteous and whole, like godly creations. And there was another: Carisi’s sweet smile, opening over his face like day’s first light. 

“I do. But loving you doesn't make me a kinder person. It only gives me the proximity to hurt you, and all the more leeway with you after I have. You need more protection than you know.” 

Carisi just shook his head, his smile intact. 

“That’s dumb,” he said in a voice so soft and tender, it rivaled the look on his face. “And, like, super dramatic. Raf… this is the easy part. You are.” 

“I am.”

Barba repeated Carisi’s words in a flattened tone. The equivalent of burnt toast, he scraped the words off his tongue and bite into them dry. 

“Yeah,” Carisi said, shrugging. 

“Easy, huh? Why, I haven't heard that word in twenty-odd years…”

Carisi planted a wet kiss to Barba’s shoulder. 

“Dummy. _You are.”_

“...you have not been paying attention.” 

“You're not so hard to figure out,” Carisi insisted, and leveled some when Barba squared his shoulders even from his reclined position. The man was bristling at the very idea that he could be seen for transparent--in all things, ever, including before his lover. 

“You get mad or scared or embarrassed and really--all it comes back to is, you want to be first in line to take ownership of your faults. That’s fine. That’s good.” Carisi’s soft smile didn’t falter, but Barba was certain something cooled in his touch. “But it messes with your perspective, ‘cause now, you don't believe anything good should belong exclusively to you.” 

“Well. You don't.” 

“I want to.” 

A heady strength to those words, as Carisi found power and fortitude in belonging. Belonging with or to or among--he was not posed to acknowledge a great amount of difference. His seat was center-stage, not balcony. He saw what was dead ahead, and paid little attention to the ancillary players. 

Barba wanted to remind him, those who killed Caesar entered stage right. 

“Fact is, I think any guy would be honored.”

“Okay. Well. Thank you. Admittedly, I take issue with the phrasing--” Carisi rolled his eyes. “But. I appreciate the sentiment. And… moving in seems, to me, a step in the right direction. If you want.”

Carisi smiled giddily through Barba’s response--poised as it was between the uneven set of his jaw as he worked around how exactly he felt about all that--and said simply, “I'm calling it, by the way. A moratorium on that question. You can ask me again in three years. I'll be right here.”

He said this with newfound confidence. Renewed confirmation that Barba wanted him to move in, wanted to _be with him_ took the sting out of all of Carisi’s doubts. He needn’t ask, now, if Barba even liked him, if it wasn’t just desire that drew them together because he knew--he _knew_ \--neither would feel so hurt if their hearts weren’t in it. Those things were their arguments’ accelerant, even if uncertainty, petty betrayals, and heavy ultimatums were responsible for all the smoke. 

They laid in bed, neither feeling quite like they once had, but both were hopeful for a swift and deliberate return to form. Barba, on the cusp of nodding off again, reached out and gripped Carisi’s hand. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, a different showing of backbone. “Stay.”

It was an apology Carisi had heard before, and though that fact should have given him pause, but didn’t. Barba’s voice was warm and dark and when Carisi heard it, he felt he was being summoned to something great.

And so he sank into what fast became an embrace: Barba curled around him, and Carisi made himself available to the effort, tucking in limbs and fitting himself as best he could against Barba, who was bigger and smaller than Carisi in ways that felt predetermined by every twinned dream and nightmare he’d had as a child. 

_Be greedy._

The thought was both a silent request to Barba and an instruction to himself. 

_Keep me._

_I want to,_ was the response Carisi imagined when Barba pressed a smattering of kisses over his shoulder and neck. 

_I will._

-

Their sleepy afternoon crept along, with the reality of sore backs and empty stomachs pulling both their bodies out of bed just before two. They dressed, drawing sweats over skin as bedsheets and warmth of one another’s bodies fell away. Carisi felt a slouch in the t-shirt and well-worn sweatpants with the threadbare knees, but thought Barba looked a picture in much the same, though he’d opted for a pink french terry crewneck sweater, sleeves pushed to expose his strong forearms. 

Carisi flipped through channels on Barba’s TV, jumping through Christmas movies and weather reports alike. He paused on a local news station, his attention stolen by a girl’s school picture, her first without braces, and the wide smile to show for it.

Both men listened to what circumstances had befallen her. 

“Not one of yours?”

Carisi gave a tight shake of his head. Benson would have called them in, holiday or no--she knew her detectives dedication was unparalleled. 

“A different precinct, then.” Barba watched along with Carisi until the brief story passed. No one would ever accuse television news to be mindful of a girl’s privacy; details were not shared because they were not known. 

Barba said, “You get anxious over the cases that don't cross your desk.” 

Carisi’s answer was slow and measured. 

“I know my work ethic. I know Rollins’ and Fin’s and the Lieu’s. I don't know anybody else’s.” He flipped off the channel, then circled back, as if he thought the anchors had forgotten anything while reading the prompter. “But at least it's out there, you know? People are gonna see this and remember, and if nothing comes of It? If they don't catch the guy?”

Barba didn’t so much as bat an eyelash. He didn’t look at the girl and think, like Carisi did, that the slight kink in her hair suggested she’d taken out her braids for the picture, and smoothed her hair over her shoulders because she thought it made her look more mature than her fifteen years. 

“People will forget,” Barba said. 

“Other people won't let them.” 

Carisi’s insistence was strong, and it was times like these that Barba knew Carisi’s big heart would find a happy home in legal advocacy. But then he blinked, and Barba was reminded that--maybe--Carisi knew he didn’t have the stomach for it. 

“That kind of senseless violence… I’ll never understand…”

“Senseless, maybe. But violence is never meaningless.”

Carisi did not want to test the subject, and Barba had nothing else to add. He returned his attention to the restaurant menu he’d pulled up on his tablet.

Because most of what Carisi had prepared went to Rollins, Christmas dinner on their end emerged as a mix of leftovers and takeout, an order Barba made in Spanish and only explained after he’d tugged on a respractable pair of jeans and gone downstairs to collect it. 

“They don’t usually deliver, but,” Barba opened the various containers while Carisi gathered plates and silverware, head ducked some to watch Barba as he spoke, “It’s where my mom and I used to go every year, after my abuela passed. She used to work there, as a cook. Before her hip gave out. And _after._ My mother had to beg her to stop…” 

As they leaned against the kitchen counter together, shoulder to shoulder, Carisi asked quietly after Barba’s grandmother. 

Memories of her were warm, but Barba remained embittered for his part in her passing. He did not mention this; his was a private shame and even years later, he felt it fully. Benson knew of Barba’s instigating his grandmother’s move and his burning culpability when he and Lucia found themselves packing up her things on entirely different terms, and that was grievous enough. Sharing the matter further, Barba thought, would only compound his guilt with embarrassment.

Sadness was… neater. 

Barba knew that rationalization process well, and given who was sat across from him, knew he didn’t have the best track record with its application. True, when applied to Carisi, the plot fell apart, but Barba guessed the odds were the dead wouldn’t up and surprise him. 

“...If she kept recipes, I guess, I’d really like to get my hands on a copy…” 

The mention was offhand, and couched in the middle of a long string of thoughts knotted together at varying distances, but Barba zeroed in on just the one. 

“She’d have liked that,” Barba murmured. His chest felt tight, the idea striking him right between the fifth and sixth ribs on his left side. He glanced at Carisi briefly then tore his gaze away, as if it hurt too much to see what she never would. 

“She’d have liked you.” 

The sentiment hit Carisi hard. Barba never made promises on behalf of anyone but himself, and the idea that his little family would show up for him while Carisi’s own ranks couldn’t bring themselves to do the same did not go unnoticed by either party.

So Carisi’s smile was strained, even a little hurt to account for his embarrassment of the discrepancy. Barba wasn’t witness to it, however; his gaze was set on a mix of black beans and rice-- _moros y cristianos,_ perhaps a cliche but nonetheless his favorite--and he felt cold despite the body leaning hot against his own. 

He was seeing ghosts. 

More now than before, visions of his grandmother found him in quiet moments and hectic scenes alike. He’d seen her in the jury box and on park benches, and despite his staring, she never materialized beyond a vague imagining. Most times it was nothing more than a sense of her smile, a huff of her tittering laughter, but nonetheless he was disturbed by the visions’ persistence. 

Barba pegged Carisi as the instigator of these meetings. Even in the matter of the hour spent that morning speaking with family he’d all but written off-- _that_ was Carisi at work, his influence having softened Barba’s heart, his infectious joy and unremitting optimism taking root now only to spring up in a year’s time. 

Miami. 

Who could say?

“I understand, okay?” Carisi said to a still-shaken Barba, who startled and mimed an attentive face just long enough to fall in step with it before he was found out.

Carisi pressed, “I understand why you would take a step back from your family. I know it wasn’t easy, that you don’t do anything without considering the consequences, first.” 

He poked at his own meal--a beautiful slab of roasted pork, and an order of fried plantains split between them--and wished things were such that there were more mouths to feed, each of them a voice so raucous that Carisi’s ache for Barba’s measured silence would fast turn monumental.

“I know… that I’m asking a lot of you, when I try to bring you into mine. You see the same circumstances you walked away from, and walking back into them isn’t something you ever thought you’d do again.” Carisi fixed his gaze with Barba’s, surprising his lover with a fearlessness he’d developed walking his first beat. Barba forgot, sometimes, where this gentle man forged his start. 

“So, thank you. For going back there with me. Even if you never do it again. Thank you for trying.” 

He opened his mouth again, and though the sentiment was ready in his heart, nothing made it past his lips. 

_And thank you,_ he meant to say, but couldn't, certain Barba would see into him more than was seamly. _For not asking how long it is I’m willing to hold out hope. Because I don’t know that yet. Maybe they’ll come around. Or maybe I’ll be on my deathbed, still thinking that._

The words drew past his eyes like a news ticker, his excuses replaying themselves again and again, and surely for his benefit alone, because Barba scarcely appeared to be listening.

Instead, Barba smiled, but the expression was weary and old, dug up from some earlier joy, dusted off and reapplied. He tried his hand at appearing more tender than sorry, a better look for him by far. 

“Of course,” Barba said. 

Simple and unremarkable as that. 

Carisi took a breath and let the steady stream of denials and protestations dissipate. 

In their absence, he saw necessity in the ability to accept where both their choices had gotten them: Barba, slowly coming in from the cold to reconnect with his family, and himself, at arm’s length and fast losing ground. Carisi found himself in much the same situation as when he’d last faced down Barba’s pride: he was scared to walk away, certain he might be forgotten, when perhaps space would have served them well.

Carisi was _still scared,_ but decided to put on a brave front. 

Tomorrow, he’d call his parents. 

Tomorrow, he’d take a stand. 

There was a reason he so respected Barba’s thought processes and determinations: the man was usually right. 

He skirted a hand up along Barba’s arm and pushed the fabric of his t-shirt up so that the kiss he pressed to Barba’s shoulder met warm, bare skin. When Barba hummed, stopped, and stared sidelong at his partner, Carisi stole a bite of the man’s meal, next, and told him nothing of his plans. 

Carisi smiled. Despite Barba’s distress for it all, they were on the same page. Love, respect, time enough to make those expressions fully known--Carisi wanted it all. Sure, he kept a longer list of demands, but he could see Barba’s through in the meantime. 

_Three years,_ he scoffed. 

That was only the start. 

-

Carisi’s confidence carried him through his decided effort--itself, another variation on the _‘mom, dad, I really need you to hear me on this’_ speech--but the outcome, regrettably, emerged as yet another variation of his parents’ own: confusion, denial, and hurt. 

And worse--distrust saddled itself at the receiving end, with his mother acting aghast for his behavior, as though it arrived without purpose or reason, its origins a genuine mystery.

It was like she awoke each and every day and chose to forget. 

Carisi parted their company with awkward hugs that did little to validate his point or assuage their concerns. He left feeling like he'd tarnished the bright shine he’d worked hard to put on his choices, and didn’t come away with the sense of resolution and self-worth that _was_ Barba’s rallying cry. 

His terms were these: a departure from family events and gatherings where he did not feel like a fully accepted part. _Because that means all of me,_ he’d implored, getting more use of the phrase than he would have liked. Then the kicker: _And it's nothing new that I’ve felt that maybe isn't the case._

For the rest of their conversation, Carisi paraded out his old standards:

_Because it’s important._

_Because I’m asking you._

_Please._

He’d been careful to keep Barba’s name out of it, for is a little good that did him. His mother made allusions to _that man_ with such venom Carisi wished he’d never forced them to meet. 

Carisi regretted that much and more. This, even. Barba’s approach was no better than his own in terms of an outcome, and _turning his cheek_ at least had a little more going for it colloquially than _turning his back._

But he didn't-- _couldn’t_ \--run to Barba with his dismay. Barba, who had warned of the slow death preoccupation with a smooth run promised, might try and empathize with Carisi’s big-hearted hopefulness, but more of him would come out in favor of having been right. Carisi knew this, and if confronted with the scenario, knew Barba wouldn’t deny it. 

Bitterly, Carisi thought he’d enjoy being seen for the villainous figure he cut in Carisi’s parents’ eyes. The fact of the matter was, he’d take any road to exceed expectations. 

He didn't peddle misery, only pragmatism. 

Carisi tried to put those ugly notions out of his head, but the drive back from Staten Island did little to clear things for him, because Carisi arrived in Barba’s car, at Barba’s building, with a poor imitation of Barba’s deeds weighing heavy in his heart. And the one thing he knew he couldn’t have in that moment was Barba himself. 

Carisi knew he’d feel like a fool going to him and saying, _I did what you said and I'm scared I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life._

And he knew he’d be lying, saying anything less. 

So he kept his distance, physically and otherwise. He hardly had to try; the perpetually short-staffed Special Victims Unit rarely saw a lull in their workload. If he kept his head down long enough, Carisi could lose all sense of time to that most awful cycle of abuse, debasement, and harm that found all too many victims before justice was done. The stories exhausted him more than the hours he put towards hearing them, and the deep, uninterrupted sleep he had in his own bed at the end of the day was the only answer to the ache set in his bones, if not the one twisting inside his heart. 

He sent a couple flirty texts to Barba, some pictures. They made him feel just the smallest bit normal, like it really was working keeping them apart, and Carisi wasn’t subtly forcing that hand. 

_[Lovely]_ was Barba’s reply to a post-shower shot, taken mid-day and at Carisi’s own apartment. 

And, a day later, _[Did you crop Rollins out?]_ with respect to a glimpse of him inside his car, having just come in from the cold and bringing with him its greatest hits: pink in his cheeks, ears, nose, and lips. All set against pale skin, all crowding around bright blue eyes as if they held warmth enough to best his heart. 

_[lol yeah]_

He followed up with a selfie taken during their time in France. Barba did not reply to that one--Carisi had sent it knowing Barba was in court, sure, but he didn't reply _afterwards,_ either--and Carisi wondered if he hadn’t unintentionally imparted his concerns onto Barba. The notion that they weren't happy together except for those all-too-brief moments well behind them. Had he known the picture would tide them both over for several days, Carisi would not have made such a paltry effort.

Either in lieu of their meeting--or else due to it--Carisi spent their time apart wondering if they'd been closer to ending things than he'd thought. Usually he could gage a life threatening situation, but Barba was a loose canon in that respect. Carisi did not know if he'd only ever look imposing, or if he was seconds from that deadliest blast.

Worse, if an end was so near, did that not render it more possible? He had been so scared that Barba would turn him away, yet he hadn’t thought too deeply on such a thing when he was entertaining his family’s antics. _Not him,_ was his family’s rallying cry, worn with a tight smile, _and not any of these other boys, not really._

Carisi was slow to realize the heart of their message, tapped out and carved into every nudge or dig.

_Just get back into step in the world we know you best in, and things will soon be like they were. You’ll come to your senses._

Just in case, Carisi avoided that potential inevitability, too.

Far from Staten Island and the respectable homes in Barba’s midtown neighborhood alike, Carisi made his way back in his intended home, his apartment. 

That's where he settled in on a Wednesday night, laying on his bedsheets and trying to count back to when it was he’d last washed them. They looked practically pressed when he’d first uncovered them, but that was the result of going undisturbed for weeks on end. They were cool to the touch and a strange comfort to him, as was much of his place. His books were as he’d left them, his DVR was in dire straits, and there was little in his kitchen that hadn’t seen its expiration date come and go. But the place had waited for him, standing still, always certain he would return. 

He had to marvel at the fact that the space was almost entirely known to him alone. Distant memories of attempted girlfriends were set exclusively on their own turf, and since establishing himself at the Academy and Fordham, his apartment became little more than a place to sleep and study. 

Carisi supposed now, with hindsight, he understood why Barba was apprehensive about assuming a presence here. 

It looked like a dorm room. 

Privately, Carisi was still curious after Barba’s exploits during such a time that he, too, mastered the one-room existence, wherein every available surface was littered with case law and ringed coffee stains. Screwing around with a professor wasn’t Barba’s natural bend--Carisi _had_ to think as much, to jive the man he knew with the handsome figure with sad, intelligent eyes he’d only seen in photographs. 

Carisi wanted to believe it was something of a heyday: being away from home, having one’s name, youth, mind, and nothing else. There was something to be said for the first taste of freedom. Carisi wondered if Barba did not want to boast a thing that Carisi himself had missed--was _still missing,_ as he carried on into his early thirties doing his monogamous best. 

Barba had told him on more than one occasion to go his own way for a spell, though he was shrewd enough not to provide an example. For all his interest as to whether _Barba_ had lived a slice of that life, Carisi did not want it for himself. He was old-fashioned in that respect, and altogether _much too suitable a catch,_ as Barba once teased, spooning him some Saturday morning in early summer. 

He’d said of Carisi’s wholehearted devotion, _“You have to understand, no one is going to believe me.”_

(It was long ago enough that Carisi had replied, “Who are you going to tell?”) 

Carisi missed that: the two of them, stolen away from the world and delighting in the absurd. But he had no desire to regress; where they were, what they’d done--it felt substantial. That Carisi was recognized for a new set of reasons when he traveled the halls of 1 Hogan Place, or how unfamiliar he’d become with his own apartment--those things told a story about how far they’d come together. Carisi felt confident in his place by Barba’s side, a thing he’d wanted in a cavalcade of forms since their first meeting. 

So why then--why _now_ \--was he sitting on a double bed, annexed to a place he’d once called home, but now was little more than a glorified walk-in closet or storage container, feeling a strange breed of sorry for himself? 

Carisi closed his eyes, and what he saw in the soft dark sickened him. 

He turned over in bed and stared at the wholly inoffensive eggshell-colored wall. 

Maybe it was work getting to him, he thought, and nothing to do with his family or Barba. 

He didn’t have it in him to feel relieved. 

More often than not, when they talked shop outside of the precinct or courthouse, Carisi’s and Barba’s discussions focused on Barba’s work--not an unusual turn, given Carisi’s interest in a law career of his own. He saw how Barba operated: dwelling on the files, studying the stories and judging the victims by his own rubric. And then, turning his attention wholly to the charged perpetrator, and addressing him with every wrong as purely as though it was written on his heart. 

It was no easy task, speaking to the worst humanity had to offer in a language he’d once revered as something akin to a higher power. These sacred concepts were degraded day after day, and Barba saw them now as a mere means to an end. 

His jaded attitude made him a better lawyer, almost prophetic in the right light. He played a shrewder game. He adapted. 

Carisi did not know how to enter the conversation Barba had with his profession. 

His job was at times more ill-defined. He played detective, therapist, archaeologist, mind-reader. Lately, he felt like a second-rate faith healer, having to lay his hands on the hurt, the wounded.

The dead. 

He failed to see results more often than not, but _God,_ did he believe.

Some days it happened that his faith was shaken. Even his understanding of so minor a thing as simple statistics was coming undone, splitting at the seams as he played every bad hand in the hopes that-- _one day_ \--he’d be dealt something like hope. 

He’d never felt so lonely with these thoughts; Carisi had always had family to turn to--not to discuss the crimes, the things he’d seen, but to crawl out of that pit and onto some well-visited plateau. There was no coming Sunday dinner to take refuge in, no afternoon spent in his childhood home, simply being in and around the familiar light held by bay windows and sanctioned by the ever-growing reach of their maple trees. 

Instead he was in some vestige of the City, sandwiched between a dozen other lives below and above him, and countless more circulating the neighborhood. He laid flat amidst it all, lounging in ratty sweats in his own apartment.

Barba texted him on the third consecutive night--a new record, now--for not seeing each other outside of work. The odd shared look or bumped shoulder was fine in its own right, but coupled with an undeniable silence, _and no follow-through,_ Barba took them for bad omens. 

_[Everything okay?]_

The text arrived at 12:09am, and Carisi knew without seeing it that Barba had mulled over sending the message, and even now was awake and standing anxiously against the kitchen counter, hand wrapped about a glass of scotch itching to be refilled. Carisi, imagining some impossible scenario wherein Barba waited up for a reply, felt like a hypothetical heel for 

He replied in a typo-filled rush, _[evryythings fine shit sorry]_

Carisi took a breath and tried to put what he was feeling into words few enough so as not to outfit a lie. 

_[im just a little out of it and tired and u know how work’s been. I needed some time by myself. sorry for not just saying so]_

He felt immediately that he’d failed.

[Is it because of something I said?] Barba wrote back, adding, [Not to pin it down or anything.]

When Barba got it in him to be self-deprecating, Carisi knew to worry. 

_[everything’s fine]_

A non-answer, and they both knew it. 

_[still looking forward to spring.]_

A canyon’s worth of a leap, and Carisi groaned after it was sent, imagining the real estate Barba’s eyebrows crossed moving from the bridge of his nose to his hairline. He was looking for a handful of answers, not every assurance Carisi saw fit to offer him. 

When Carisi’s hail mary garnered no immediate response, he very nearly set about calling Barba, though he had fewer words to utter than he had to tap out one thumb at a time. 

But Barba met him with a slew of replies, never being one to lack them. 

_[Okay. Hope to see you before then.]_   
_[Take your time.]_   
_[If I can help you, please let me.]_   
_[Goodnight.]_

Each stopping where the previous started, Carisi did not know whether or how to answer any of them. He suddenly found his sheets to be as comfortable as burlap, his ceiling low and cracked. He listened for--and heard--the lives of others happening around him. Lovemaking and homemaking and fiery fights with raised voices, or television to drown out icier ones. He felt like an interloper, but couldn’t bear to see his own existence for what it was, in this moment--in perfect company. 

He shouldn’t be there. 

He wondered if returning to Barba, a tale of foretold failure on his lips, would hurt as much as Carisi imagined it would, or if seeing the lack of surprise in Barba’s features would leave him feeling that much worse. 

_Get tougher,_ he told himself, but it didn’t take. He’d spent all of Barba’s borrowed rough-and-tumble attitude telling his parents he was too old to be made to feel like a naughty child, and too in love to be ashamed of that fact. 

There, in that divet of warmth that found him as he recalled the point of his endeavor, if not its failure, Carisi found the only answer that mattered. 

_[Love you too]_


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So I've been sitting on this finished chapter for maybe two days? Because I'm not a fan of it by association, somewhat. (lol I still hate the show so much for these last two seasons, holy shit.) Mostly, I'm still not certain I'm going to finish this story, and this chapter is kind of a point-of-no-return in that respect. 
> 
> My original plans demanded _so much more_ but I really want this done and over with. 
> 
> So, a story that's getting perfunctory edits and no love. Just what every reader wants to waste their time with lmao :))))))
> 
> ALSO, I must add that you all reading and sending your words of encouragement really mean the world to me. I apologize for not replying to every comment--I tend to cry about them instead. You kids are the best. :')

Christmas was good, Carisi decided. Even the argument was good, in that way every necessary thing was. 

But the nights of sleeping alone in his apartment began to pile up, and he had to face facts. He was forcing space between himself and Barba, wedging in the potential worst-case scenario: losing his own family to pettiness and wounded pride, and in the same breath, promising away all future prospects.

Carisi hated that he couldn’t snuff those concerns out, that he wasn’t as good as his word. It was childish, his approach, because of course Barba would understand his reservations. 

Only, he’d be _expecting_ them, too. 

Carisi did not want to turn up solely to disappoint. 

The new year brought him no nearer to Barba, but his roots--hungry to reach deep, running waters--took hold where they could. 

Presently, that was with Rollins, sat on the floor of her apartment with their legs splayed out around a collection of toys, Jesse toddling around between them, sometimes dropping fast on her backend to play with whatever caught her eye.

Carisi kept a steady hand raised to catch her should she drop; Rollins, he noticed, did not wait like he did, but acted only when necessary, and in that she never faltered. 

For all the doubts that plagued her pregnancy, Rollins emerged a resolute mother. 

Carisi wondered if that wasn’t just how things were meant to be--the polar opposite of what was hoped and planned for. Perhaps in that same orchestration, he would never have children. He forced himself to consider a life, always shifted to this outlier position, surrounding by friends and _their_ families. He knew Rollins trusted him implicitly with Jesse. He knew he was blurring the lines, looking for exactly those possibilities.

He’d drawn a hard line with his family, and didn’t tell Barba such to the point that he disappeared with all the evidence--how quiet his phone had been of late, and the fact that he didn’t make his weekend pilgrimage to Staten Island after the holidays, the thoughtful, absent stares and the stealing away to pray. 

Carisi supposed it was his own fault, then, that doubting himself for his choice made him feel isolated, not empowered.

“Ugh.” Rollins glanced at her buzzing phone before laying it facedown on the couch. “Declan.”

“Again?” Carisi asked, but left it at that. Rollins could read into the question what she wanted, and answer how she saw fit. 

Presently, that was a wave of her hand.

_My one-time-superior officer, one-time-one-night-stand, father of my child, yada yada._

“He’s not even in the country. He was, two months ago, and I didn’t get any of _this,_ then.” Carisi supposed this wasn't the first text-call-text combo. “I don’t want him to even try. It’s not happening. And before you _start,_ mostly, he’s asking after me.”

“Oh.”

 _“Yeah.”_ The indignant huff her response rolled out on made Carisi think of his sisters, and smile. “Now that everything’s snapped back into place.”

A bemused little smile put the dimples in Carisi’s cheeks as he searched for the proper rejoinder. 

“...Congratulations.” 

Rollins shook her head, stopping only to smile in the crown of soft curls adorning Jesse’s head. “Who needs him. I’ve got all I need right here.” 

Carisi said nothing; here merely studied the picture they made before him, mother and child, an idyllic pair, and not unfinished in the least unless he should widen his gaze, search the room, and wonder… 

But that was not Carisi’s inclination anymore. His eyes did not wander when it came to Rollins; she was decided in her company, and _she_ left no room for doubt, there. Carisi had only come to see what she saw. 

“She’s mine and I’m her’s,” Rollins said, tucking her child in for a hug before rearing back, expression pinched. “Oh, God. And she’s loaded.” 

“The comedic timing on this kid,” Carisi grinned, already sitting up and reaching out to take Jesse from her mother. “I’ve got this one.” 

“You’re a saint,” Rollins said, and gamely handed over her child. “Can I say that? Or is it blasphemy?” 

“Uh, yes to both.” 

With a hand as practiced as it was gentle, Carisi made quick work of the dirty diaper at Jesse’s makeshift changing station. His previously gifted heated diaper wipes caddy was not a feature there, though he said nothing for its absence. He was soon back with Rollins on her new shag carpeting, Jesse sat in his lap where she seemed determined to use her small fingers to turn the stiff pages in one of the new board books from her collection. Rollins watched as he murmured sounds of encouragement to her daughter as she struggled until success was hers, having turned a page from a gaggle of geese to a pod of dolphins. Carisi looked more ecstatic than she did for the accomplishment. 

“Hey,” she said, reaching out to give his knee a friendly shove. “Thanks for coming over on Christmas. Bringin’ all that stuff for Jesse and taking pictures and cooking… that was real sweet.” 

“It was Barba’s idea, believe it or not.” 

“Oh, I figured. Those snakeskin baby booties?” 

Admittedly, they made a _look_ out of any onesie Rollins managed to wriggle Jesse into any given morning, and per her nanny’s gossip, both she and her daughter were the envy of the other mothers.

“You really call him that, still, or is the professionalism for my benefit?”

Carisi looked up in surprise. The fact of the matter was, he and Barba went unremarked on by those who knew them best. They’d settled into a place of normality among their colleagues and friends, who seemed to respect the requirements of the former before the needs of the latter. 

Carisi realized he was glad Rollins chose the road less traveled. 

“It was Raf’s idea.”

Rollins nodded and took another tentative step down that path. “I thought you’d do Christmas with your family, honestly.”

“Yeah… no.” Disappointment coated his throat, thick as molasses, and Carisi coughed twice to clear a path. “That wasn’t in the cards for us, uh, this year.”

“Sorry,” Rollins said, and soon looked sorrier than she sounded. She could only imagine what it was Carisi felt he’d lost, there, when family wasn’t a thing he’d ever wanted to run from, yet the distance was there, and he could not trace his way back. 

“It’s a hell of a thing to grow up, make a life you can be proud of, and still--through no fault of your own--manage to disappoint your parents.” She shrugged, feeling out of her depth for not harboring that shame as deeply as Carisi did. Being said to have slept with her superior officer, then running away to New York, she had to believe she’d done worse. 

She wondered if the Carisis thought much the same of their son.

She fought the sudden, untenable urge to set the record straight. There had been enough chaos in her early life that Rollins could forget the misery, and while New York brought with it its own host of problems, she was better for them. She’d been cornered into making the hard choices that ultimately remade her. 

Carisi’s choices ran the gamut from _rom-com_ to _fairytale,_ and still, his happy ending seemed ever-perched on that unreachable horizon. 

“You want any tips?” Rollins asked. Her easy smirk was a throwback to a life much-lived. A beautiful, healthy child in a bright, clean apartment were not disappointments by any stretch. 

“Nah, I think I’m all set.” 

“Go get ‘em, tiger.” 

She smiled, watching him, hoping it would prove contagious. But Carisi kept his gaze low, fixed on the pages of Jesse’s books, as if the text was so complicated as to merit his full attention. 

Rollins wondered when this man had wormed his way behind her heart, and if that’s why it ached when she saw him like this.

“But, really. I enjoyed it. Christmas. I mean, I figured she wouldn’t remember this, so why bother, but… I will.” 

“...Well, in Whoville they say that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day…” 

Carisi’s reply was light, lighthearted--a ready and easy departure from the topic at hand--and Rollins didn’t buy it for a second. 

_“Hey.”_

She didn’t have to ask, but did anyway, thinking that she’d shoulder the blame if Carisi needed to get something off his chest, even for not wanting to offer it up. 

“You’ve come by my place or gone out for drinks with all of us three nights this past week. That’s more than I’ve seen of you outside of work in months, not that I’m complaining. What’s going on, huh?”

The question--even for being expected, even _desired_ \--sent Carisi reeling. 

He thought he’d known it wasn’t a question of relationship troubles--he’d had those and shared them with Rollins in fits and starts--except everything before now felt like a lie, and Carisi, a liar. 

What if, to another’s ear, he sounded just as he had before? What if Barba was just another along his knotted string of valiant failures? What if Rollins came to know that before he did? 

“We had a fight. Sort of.” Carisi wrinkled his nose, the subject of his incompetence here having a permanent air of putridity. “This is private, alright?”

“I gathered that from the whispering.”

“He doesn’t want kids. I don’t know if he means that literally--”

“Likely.”

“--or if he’s saying something else, too. Like, ‘we’re not serious, so don’t get ahead of yourself.’” Carisi looked miserable at the thought, the sentiment hanging from his neck like an ever-tightening noose, cinching slowly over his naked skin. “But _then_ he said some weird stuff like…” 

After relaying to her the bare-bones of his recent conversation with Barba, Carisi sought her opinion: “So, what. Is he thinking endgame or just being considerate?”

Rollins, worried that her conversation with Barba was what triggered all this, knew she had to come clean. She gathered up Jesse and set her down in her playpen, and when Carisi didn’t rise from the floor to take their conversation to the kitchen or couch, she plopped right back down beside him on the rug. There, she leveled with her friend.

“Look, Carisi… Barba knows how much you want kids. He said as much at Christmas. And he seemed… resigned to it. Something--I couldn’t put a finger on what, at the time--” 

Rollins didn’t feel like she was reaching for an answer so much as plucking the one sat before Carisi’s very eyes, round and plump, like untouched fruit. Somehow, Carisi had willfully ignored it, and seemed content to starve rather than digest this one particular truth. 

“--Like he expected you’d have it, and he decided then and there to be happy for you.” She held up her hands, the expression on Carisi’s face just shy of combative. “Nothing angry or sorry about it--he just came to a simple conclusion.” 

“But that’s crazy,” Carisi blurted out. He could not imagine taking such a stand without wanting to sever ties. Even for having discussed it, for having _agreed,_ Carisi still did not understand Barba’s position. And hearing the notion twice now, uttered from the mouths of those who knew him best, he still could not fathom the sense they seemed to appreciate. 

To him, there was none. 

A family was an expression of love--Carisi knew this, he felt it in the very marrow of his bones. It went to Italy and back in the spines of is ancestors. They folded the sentiment into pastries, unloaded it like wares when they arrived on the crest of a wave onto new shores. 

“I’m sure Barba thinks he’s being kind. And it looking like it does, I’d wager the guy hasn’t had a lot of practice.”

“The two of you,” Carisi grumbled.

“Hey,” Rollins said, and held her hands up for show. She was in no position--morally or physically--to stop anyone from making their most heartfelt mistakes. 

“Take the chance if you gotta. Go all in. I just think the people that care about you… care that you’re gonna be really hurt if it doesn’t shake out like you want.” 

Rollins was very obviously trying to keep hopeful, and while Carisi was glad for the stay of execution, he remained wary for how it presented itself. These determinations Barba made without Carisi’s knowledge only ever seemed to grow in intensity and consequence, and Carisi feared of one day learning of something too late. 

“He’s going to make his choices,” Rollins reasoned. “He probably thinks the same of you.”

“I don’t think like that, though,” Carisi countered, feeling as though his side made just as much sense as the one Barba had staked out for himself, which Rollins seemed to be speaking for in his absence. “My choices aren’t independent of him anymore.” 

Carisi scrubbed a hand over his face, rubbing at his brow as if to relieve a spot of thought unbecoming.

“God. There was a time that was a good thing. Literally _the only thing_ I wanted. You know? Nothing else, just to spare a second’s thought for one another. A minor miracle, now.” 

Carisi glanced up just in time to see Rollins’ expression fall, only for her to then heave it up into a show of certitude she surely no longer possessed. Carisi narrowed his eyes and searched the display for meaning. “What?”

“That’s just… That’s a lot.”

“I don’t think I’m getting ahead of myself,” Carisi said, a touch defensively. “It’s been a year.” 

“No, I know, I wasn’t--” Rollins waved a hand. “I’m impressed.” These were not the machinations of a man smitten with a sharp tongue and a flashy wardrobe. And to that point, Rollins had a confession to make.

“And I’m thinking, maybe I’m not the most knowledgeable person to hear our your concerns as far as… longevity goes.” She gave a hapless shrug. “You could try Fin. He and Munch were partners for over a decade. And Fin plays in his canasta league, I’m not even kidding.”

“Ha, ha,” Carisi muttered, though he warmed to the notion of some tried-and-true advice almost instantly. 

“That isn’t even the worst idea,” he lamented, and Rollins smiled as he concluded, “I’m so fucked.”

“Hey, cheer up,” Rollins said, departing her lovelorn friend for her kitchen, and returning with a six pack. “You said the magic words.”

-

Stood alone in an empty hallway, briefcase at his feet, shoulder sloping against the cool smoothness of the marbled wall detailing, Barba stared at his phone. He may as well have had the flashlight feature on, for as useless as the gesture was. He’d scrolled through months of old e-mails, but couldn’t tease his eyes towards seeing any purpose than what he was waiting for: an opening in Judge Bertuccio’s schedule. 

The man was in his office, barking at someone on the phone, or else some poor soul was sat in the man’s very presence, too verbally battered to throw a counterpunch. Barba could hear him even for moving away from the door, and he knew silence would be his cue to barge in on his supposed 5:50pm appointment. He watched the time meet, then surpass that proposal, but still he waited. There wasn’t a secretary to lock eyes with him and give a near-imperceptible shake of her head--a nod of, _it’s not happening today, pal._

And worse--if anyone saw him, there wasn't the slightest shred of deniability that he was meeting anyone but Judge Bertuccio.

Perhaps it was due to his shrewd political instincts that Bertuccio did not make the move along with other judges to finer digs in refurbished rooms on the west side of the building. He kept the same small, partially-subterranean office he’d always had, saying to anyone who asked--or didn’t--that he didn’t move with the tides. 

Barba reasoned the man knew what he’d lucked into all those years ago, and wanted to keep his private street level exit for the purpose of taking long lunches or welcoming unseen guests. 

“Barba.” 

Barba didn't know how he’d missed the snap of her heels down the corridor, but Rita Calhoun had arrived, looking more annoyed for the late invitation than the late meeting. That alone felt like a slight, and Barba hadn’t even opened his mouth yet.

And when he did, Barba did not fare much better. 

“Rita. You made it. Thank y--”

“Oh, Christ. You're thanking me? What did you fuck up, and how colossally?”

She looked positively _giddy_ at the prospect, so much so that Barba doubted her client’s fate even registered. She saw the value only in watching her self-righteous friend hoisted by his own petard. 

Bertuccio’s office door swing open and Barba lost his opportunity to sway her to his side with an explanation. 

The judge glared as though it had been Barba causing the ruckus. He huffed his annoyance, but turned and signaled for them to follow.

When Calhoun swatted his arm as she passed--an affectionate gesture, nevermind how it looked or felt--Barba knew the distress showed on his face. He smothered it, sent it gasping for breath as he took one and hardly waited for the question to be asked before diving into his answer. 

“Your honor, it has come to my attention that a member of the jury may be inclined to unfairly influence his peers, and, ah…”

Despite his practicing, that was as far as Barba had gotten in a point-blank explanation. 

Bertuccio lowered himself slowly into the plush chair behind his desk. The labored effort seemed to drag all concepts of time and space along with it, as all heads were drawn to the watching of this man get comfortable and speak into the awful silence Barba had walked himself into.

“And how is it you came to know this?”

“He approached me this afternoon and offered to sway the jury in my client’s favor--or attempt to.”

Barba caught himself and curbed his sentiment. He’d played every scenario out in his mind: overblowing the matter and making himself look like a fool, underplaying it and being seen for a conspirator-- _but a brown-noser all the same, for coming clean_ \--and perhaps worst of all, looking uncertain for what he’d chosen to do. That, he knew, would sink him. The judge would see embarrassment for shame, and shame for guilt, and Barba would go spiraling down some unbeaten path reeking of innuendo and scandal. 

“Out of the goodness of his heart?” Bertuccio chuckled, reaching for the file concerning the case at hand. He’d listen, but already doubted the misconduct would merit a mistrial. Barba would dance around an issue if it would trouble his case, but he wouldn’t drag out the inevitable. 

He wasn’t one for the political game, but the man wasn’t stupid. 

Though, Bertuccio--who’d entertained a failure of a run for City Council in his youth, turning around and becoming a judge in two years’ time, just to show his detractors where to stuff it--supposed a reasoned argument could be made for only the stupid entering politics, and only their kings winning such a losing game. 

Bertuccio stepped into another bout of silence as Barba laid it down. He kicked up the dust, pressing, “Mr. Barba?”

Barba remembered looking straight ahead at the judge as he answered: “In exchange for a date, actually.”

Beside him, Calhoun barked out a raucous laugh. A single, solitary sound that to Barba’s ears was the right level of absurd for the whole endeavor. 

“The goodness in his--” she started to jeer, but Barba silenced her with a dirty look. 

“Yes, Rita, thank you. We all got there with you.”

“You _dog,_ ” she teased. 

Barba turned swiftly to the judge at that point, and there laid his gaze. After all, it wasn’t to Calhoun that he had to make his case. 

“I obviously didn’t--”

“No,” Bertuccio reasoned on Barba’s behalf, and for one foolish moment Barba felt light, in the clear. _Yes,_ he wanted to cheer, to cajole that thought onwards and to its rightful conclusion. _I would never do that! You’re right!_

But then he watched as Bertuccio began to think, to pull together what he knew about ADA Barba with what he thought about him. He put the file away and was unamused, because while he understood the ADA’s haste to divulge this sordid non-happening--it would look far worse if he hadn’t and the thing became known--his propriety did nothing to alleviate the distinct displeasure Bertuccio felt simply _hearing of it._

“No,” he repeated, slowly, and the word seemed to escape from the air kept in his jowls. “You’re rather… publicly seeing a NYPD detective.”

It would forever be among his greatest personal failures that the first thought to enter Barba’s mind was one of blame, and one of unseamly vindication. 

His words to Carisi on that matter had once been painfully clear: _I’ll ruin me. You’re just the pitfall of choice._

And Barba wanted to deny-- _something._ If not Carisi, then perhaps the man’s influence-- _any man’s influence_ \--over Barba himself. 

Barba bit hard into his tongue.

He knew from where that notion stemmed, what putrid root it traveled along, where and how it fed.

Barba dug out from under that first blast of embarrassment and blame, and once standing in the clear wasn’t able to stop the ready defense of himself and Carisi from shooting out of his mouth. He kept one in his back pocket, always, and though he was nothing like a quickdraw, Barba liked knowing the sentiment was there, that he’d thought to keep it. 

“Publicly… in that we filed the requisite disclosure paperwork.”

Barba knew his tone had been sharp--unwisely so. But there was nothing flashy about bureaucracy, a point he did not think he had to drive home, though he’d tailgate it regardless. 

Bertuccio either seemed to tire of the conversation at that moment, or else he decided on the spot it had always been a waste of his time. Either way, his hand returned the file to its accordion sleeve, and he looked upon the two waiting attorneys out from under his heavily-lined brow. Even sunk low in his rolling desk chair, the judge had a way of making anyone stood before him feel infinitely smaller. 

“Keep your flouncing to a minimum, Mr. Barba, and perhaps we won’t have this problem again.”

Small was an understatement.

Barba felt as though he’d shrunk to the size of a walnut, and _still,_ he was the center of attention. The combination left him dumbstruck. 

He wasn’t ashamed to admit what had first hit him was the idea that _that was it,_ and he wasn’t facing a mistrial or some other vast impediment to his case, the efforts of which he’d considered himself cleared from for only a blissful half hour after closing arguments. His case was intact--on a precipice, still, but holding fast. 

It was only after that bubble of hope leapt into his throat that he choked on it, hearing what had actually put it there.

Calhoun, anger buzzing through her, had started in: “Your honor--”

Barba had to cut her off. 

Had to do it with a smile. 

“I’ll certainly _try,_ your honor.”

Nothing was promised, Barba reminded himself. Least of all favors. 

He told himself that much a hundred times in the span of just those few words, spoken wryly, their anger and hurt buried so deep the judge wouldn’t find them, even if he cared to look. Bertuccio didn’t have to go the way he seemed to be going--perhaps only giving a word of warning to the jurors, something to rattle the loose one back squarely into his seat among the twelve--and surely would _not,_ if Barba so much as breathed in the other direction. 

The risk, Barba knew, wasn’t his for the taking. 

He imagined explaining a mistrial to Claudia and her parents. 

_He insulted me, so…_

_I can’t take a joke, and…_

_...What do you know, I don’t hate myself as much as someone thinks I should._

Bertuccio dismissed the pair with a wave of his heavy hand--not so special a gesture without the black robes, Barba thought privately. Further returning the man to mere mortal status was the wedding band wedged too-tight on his finger. Dull and worn, maybe even a little tarnished along its exterior, it reminded Barba that Bertuccio liked to think of himself as _man, alone_ in the courtrooms over which he presided, yet he was as tethered to a bad marriage as anyone Barba knew, and his judgement did not precede his title. 

And in that moment, Barba knew that was it. If he didn’t have anything to say then, he never would. He couldn’t lodge a complaint after what was essentially a gift doled out to him, on the back of an crass line or not. Barba knew he should be so happy to accept one with the other. 

Calhoun caught his arm when they exited Bertuccio’s chambers.

But she wasn’t Carisi, or Benson, or a handful of others in his life who found they could stand to empathize with him. She didn’t offer a pitying word or look; she grabbed him for the simple purpose of making him _stay,_ making him _look at her,_ and letting her _see._

This was the Rafael Barba who shouted down judges? Who spoke as sharply as he dressed? Who let himself be strangled only so that he could hang his opponents? 

“What,” Barba said, and when Calhoun didn’t answer him, he added coolly, “Oh, that made you uncomfortable?” 

He held his tongue so as not to speak another word, because what he really wanted to do in that moment was blame _her._

Because she was nearest, yes, but because she had _laughed,_ gaining first from Barba’s indignity a little undue amusement. If she felt ashamed for it, Barba thought, _Good._

Calhoun sniffed indignantly, reading as much on her friend’s face. 

“I’m surprised at your restraint,” she told him. Her tone was cold and unwavering, and she seemed to draw the words out from her Gucci coat and drop them in the dead of winter. 

“You’d like that--for me to have said something, and win you the case right there?” he threw back, and grinned like he meant it. “Thanks _so much_ for your concern. I’ll be self-righteous when a child’s rape case is off the table. You let me know when you’re through feasting on it.”

He said that much to send her packing, but Calhoun was intent on sharing his cab to midtown, so she kept in step with him as they ventured through the building, their heads held high, though neither had anything to feel proud of. 

What Barba had hoped could be contained to an awful, humiliating moment in a judge’s chambers now carried through hallways and down a short elevator ride, lingering and worsening like a terrible rotten smell. 

Judge Bertuccio said what he had to Barba’s _face._

What flew off his tongue after a few drinks, around card tables, with other judges for an audience? 

The thought met Barba not on a wave of sickness or dread, or even anger--which would have been preferable--but an eerie silence, a metaphysical shrug of the shoulders. The absence of wonder was concrete understanding. 

He knew he did not lay claim to Bertuccio’s respect for any number of reasons. This was only one of them.

“Where’s your co-counsel?” Barba asked of Calhoun after they exited the building. Nevermind that Barba had chosen not to notify him; so, too, had the thought missed Calhoun. Spencer Reevely’s exclusion even went unremarked on by Bertuccio, who likely overlooked the young attorney, mistaking him for a law student earning some course credits interning for his father’s law firm. Barba supposed that really wasn’t so far from the truth.

“Making absurd promises to my client, no doubt,” Calhoun said, and expertly kept the sting from her voice. 

“Even you can only get a guilty man so much leeway.”

He sounded tired. _Immeasurably so._ Calhoun might have chalked it up to the scene made just moments ago, but Barba had already taken everything from that encounter and buried it deep down, denying it until such a time as he had a win under his belt, a drink in his hand, and a night to himself. She knew as much, having intruded on him in the past. 

She used to think Barba was a shameless cad for taking the work they did so personally. But the heartbroken look on his face--the one he only ever could school from his features just a moment too late--when he lost had her reasoning that, for the people sat behind him, putting their hope and hurt on his shoulders, it genuinely was.

Barba wouldn’t sacrifice his pride for anything less.

Calhoun continued, again speaking of the entitled Reevely, “If he didn’t show up for court, he wouldn’t know a thing about this case.”

It was a smooth promise not to clue Reevely in on things that might have happened elsewhere. 

_Another favor,_ Barba thought bitterly. _My cup runneth over._

“Do you think he knows you're both defending a pedophile?”

Calhoun didn't so much as blink; her professionalism steeled her from the darkest insinuations made even by her dearest friends. 

“We’re defending a school,” she said, and even sounded like she meant it. 

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Rita.” 

“Whatever makes you feel like a big, strong man, Rafael.” 

Her lip curled into a tight smile as she rolled his name off her tongue. Sometimes she could goad him into this--an appreciation for the absurdity of their lives, of a friendship that refused to quit against such divergent paths. The pendulum always came swinging back, allowing them to enter into a space of hovering peace, where each could allow themselves a drink or a meal or a smidgen of conversation held in every color of their past. 

Still, Calhoun feared that reality would one day seize the momentum, and physics would fail, and she’d inevitably lose this friendship to the bitterness of any given hour. 

“Putting away predatory sex offenders does that _very_ well,” Barba said coolly. 

He hailed a nearby cab and held the door for Calhoun when it drew to the curb.

Reality hadn’t beat her, yet. 

It did not miss her, however, that Barba quieted almost instantly after giving the driver her address. Taking her cues from him, Calhoun said nothing as Barba stared tiredly at his phone, the textbox empty as he considered what to say to Benson about the status of the case, to the family about whether they might face a complication in court, or indeed to Carisi, who he thought might have some claim to know the failings of his spirit.

He typed a few words, took them back. Started again. Quit.

It was verging dangerously on pathetic. 

Calhoun snatched the phone from the cradle made with Barba’s intept hands. She stuffed it into the man’s own jacket pocket and met his affronted glare with one of equal tenor. 

“Don’t pretend you’re the first person to shed a little personal pride for the job, Rafael. It’s unbecoming.” 

“And I suppose you think I could stand to lose a pound of flesh or two.” 

Barba intoned the statement as a joke, but they both knew Bertuccio’s hands were wet with his share.

“I think you found the only port in a shitstorm, and are surprised it’s leaking.”

Barba let a corner of his mouth twist for her efforts.

“You’ve said that to me before.”

“And you never listen.” 

With Calhoun by his side, Barba sank again into the silence of not knowing whether their lives were all they were meant to be, or some distorted vision of all they’d planned. 

“It’s always fun sharing a car with you,” Calhoun said as they slowed to a stop along her street. “Makes every cab a hearse.”

She left him with a parting squeeze of his shoulder, a grip so sharp it would not be confused for comfort, should he want that. Calhoun was all about deliverables; comfort weighed too much on the recipient’s expectation. What she could give was a shock to his system, a reminder that he was as whole as he felt pain for being so. 

As soon as the door shut and Barba gave the driver a new address, his phone cleared his pocket and rested fitfully in his palm again. Still, the words weren’t there. 

As he contemplated reaching out--how long had it been, now, since only seeing Carisi during work hours?--Barba found his thoughts had strayed from the case and the strange precipice on which it now teetered. Rather, he was preoccupied with his own response, confused for its weakness, and uncertain of Carisi’s part in it. 

Barba played the scenarios out in his mind, all of them ranging from informing to complaining, and none offering much insight into his discomfort. 

By the time he was sure-footed in his building’s elevator, his wallet a few bills lighter for traipsing all over Manhattan, Barba was increasingly sure that he didn’t have much to say. What he wanted, instead, was to have the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach explained to him.

Because he had _questions,_ all of them churning in his belly like a waiting sickness. Barba colored them as doubts when he tipped a bottle of scotch, glass raised eagerly to meet it. He swallowed it down, staining them all. 

_Why do I love you so much?_

_Why am I doing this to myself?_

-

A couple beers made fast work of Carisi’s tight lips and hard-bitten tongue.

They were lounging on Rollins’ couch, Carisi pitted forward, bent somewhat to rest his elbows on his knees. His hands would occasionally leap outward to dance around whatever point he was making.

Even for ceding some extra space to Carisi’s nervous ticks, Rollins was far more comfortable being the one without the problem, for once.

“It won’t happen by accident,” Rollins said needlessly. Though, sometimes she thought Carisi needed to hear the empty reason behind a person’s limitations. He thought so highly of everyone, first and foremost, even when presented with the realities of their work. She did not envy him that. 

He was routinely disappointed. 

Rollins gestured with her bottle, sort of raising it in favor of whatever unseen force was to blame for matters of the heart.

“Falling in love, that’s a different story. But all the rest…”

Carisi cocked his head and grinned, and Rollins was thrilled. A loopy, easy Carisi was a much broader target than when he sank, spilling his whole lanky form improbably into that narrow space of stoicism. 

“What, suddenly you gotta be coy about it?”

“You wanna talk coy?” Rollins asked, eyebrows raised. She’d seen more heat off an Easy Bake Oven than her two colleagues, keeping cool as they did in professional passings. When she looked for It, however, the proof there was there-- _scores of it_ \--in Carisi, tracking Barba’s movements through the squadroom, and Barba, searching him out to begin with. 

And the both of them, planting their asses atop one another’s desk as though it was preferential seating. The ease of their most commonplace movements spelled a lack of tension for which sex was the only answer. It was happening _somewhere._ Rollins had never been shy about asking Carisi after any of it; the ferocious blush that met his cheeks when she did was too great to pass up. 

Carisi was already shaking his head, as if the color would only strike him if he laid in wait for it.

“I’m not telling you that. Any of it. It's for _mature audiences only.”_

His reasoning was a dig at Rollins’ bit of prop work, prodding as she was her mouth and cheek with the long neck if her beer bottle. Even as the object prodded along, she looked bewildered for the insinuation that she was anything less than all her thirty-five years, a mother and an accomplished civil servant besides. 

“Coy as a fish pond,” she tutted, still slighted that she should be a dishonest custodian of Carisi’s nearest truths. 

And because she was never one to play the long game, she spoke decidedly and fitfully, saying in a cheery taunt, “I bet he is absolutely _filthy._ ”

The ferocious pink of Carisi’s cheeks betrayed him, and Rollins howled with delight.

They drank and bickered and teased one another until the swell of conversation had built up behind them, and the rivines they followed on foot were no longer enough. They soon stood before an ocean of things unsaid, and Rollins took that first step into the tide.

“So there’s a decision to be made, one you’ve both got to stand by.” She prodded Carisi’s thigh with her foot, an attempt to keep the mood genial despite the topic. “What do you want, huh? What do you really want?” 

“I want him,” Carisi began, and his quiet tones did nothing to belie his fervent honesty. If anything, he sounded more focused, more determined to set right what was so jumbled in his heart. “And I want him to want a family, too.” 

Rollins knew better than to respond to that. Her pitying smile said it all.

“Yeah, yeah. I hear myself.” 

Rollins took a breath and thought long and hard about what it was she meant to share.

Nick Amaro was out of her life, absent longer now than he was in it, and lost to some sun-soaked slice of California besides. His betrayal of the east coast should have stricken him from her good graces, but Rollins still felt compelled to protect him--always had, when the NYPD, his father, and his family all failed to do as much. 

She realized later she’d only concerned herself with his reputation, which reflected poorly on her. She’d given her own heart so little oversight--what did his merit?

She’d treated him like a drug; he was just as exciting and intoxicating as the best of them. Her recovery gave her some insight on why that was, and so when she opened her lips to his name, Rollins began to speak very carefully of the man she’d once been so enamoured with. 

“Nick once told me he thought Barba had some serious issues with his father,” she said, and waited for Carisi to join her with a look of quiet consternation. “And maybe that they were of… similar experiences.” 

“Yeah,” Carisi agreed noncommittally. He’d heard about Amaro’s testimony against his father, against the constant and crushing abuse he doled out to all under his control. While Barba didn’t echo the words--not so explicitly, and perhaps that was for Carisi’s benefit--Carisi thought they carried the same hardened stare, the same doubt as to a father’s infallibility. 

But any in-depth conversation between Carisi and Rollins now was stalled by default; there was the matter of confidences not to be betrayed, for one, but neither could deny the fundamental desire not to have the unpleasant conversation at all. They’d seen the toll abuse from a parent took on a child, seen the ways it picked away at the soul, broke the heart, or betrayed the body. 

There was an ugly kind of relief born of not knowing where their friends and lovers had been taken, into what dark depths they lost their spirits, or how far they’d traveled back in order to again know love and joy.

“I don’t know much for fathers, myself,” Rollins offered, throwing her hat into the ring, but watching it land south of where she’d aimed. “That was never really my bag of tricks. But what I know from Nick was… what he intimated maybe he and Barba shared in some respects… it was a constant, pervasive betrayal. And that’s nothing to learn from.” 

“Nick’s a good dad,” Carisi insisted. Assault charges and anger management issues aside, the man had moved across the country to follow his kids, to spend his life in service to their own. That was the bottom line--Carisi believed as much, and adamantly so.

Rollins sighed, the certainty leaving her voice as surely as the breath escaping her lungs.

“Sure he is, now. But even he’d tell you, back then…” 

Rollins remembered a night he’d come to her apartment, but avoided the bed. He cried to her in the doorway, expression panicked and voice torn to shreds, _I scared Zara. I frightened my baby girl._

Through a rush of tears and choking breaths, he’d told her he’d been angry at Zara for forgetting her backpack at her mom’s place. He’d yelled, but didn’t raise a hand to her-- _never_ \--but that was a distinction without a difference. He’d hurt her.

The shame and terror Rollins had witnessed was deep and lived-in. There was no part of Amaro that did not know what he was doing, where he could have taken it, what he must have looked like to his child, and how terribly wrong that was. 

“Kids were something he wanted, and still it’s tough. Barba seems to have made himself clear where he stands.”

“You don’t know him,” Carisi said quietly. “He can want something and just… act like it doesn’t even matter.” 

Miserably, Carisi thought about all the times that _something_ was _him._

He took another swig of his beer--fast, messy. He wiped his bottom lip, after. 

“Uh. That’s all.”

Rollins made a wide, all-inclusive gesture. She translated, “If you’ve got more to say, I’m up to hearin’ it. I’m in a very mellow space right now.” 

“Um.” 

Carisi was hesitant to draw the conversation back squarely to himself and his needs, but Rollins looked eager for the turnaround. She preferred Nick Amaro’s name in her memories, not on her tongue. 

Head tipped back, eyes closed, Carisi took a brief moment to set the scene for himself, to remember how it was he felt and what transpired, and how those things seemed to perpetually chase one another. He’d been in Barba’s office, with the team, hanging back just a second like he’d always done, even before he’d been anything to Barba but an annoying law student with a badge.

Even for their relationship spanning every imaginable spectrum, they still ended up talking law.

Barba mentioned the fact that the victim had brought charges on a previous case and lost--a fact that was rendering her hesitant to try again, now. 

_Good prosecutors,_ he’d said, _are hard to come by._

_Some of them don’t even practice._

Barba had said this, Carisi guessed, because he couldn’t--in earshot of their colleagues--ask what he wanted to know, which was when Carisi planned to return to his orbit, or if he’d taken Barba’s doubts to heart, and began to stray. But he could needle him about his desires and intentions in other venues, so long as Carisi’s waffling was a facet he saw across the board.

(This was what Barba told himself. Failing to act in service to his career was something he could accuse of Carisi very easily, but faced with the genuine article, Barba lost his nerve.)

Carisi blinked his eyes open. Feeling tired for the gesture did not surprise him. Keeping secrets, holding back his thoughts, denying himself the preferred company of the man he loved were all tiresome activities. But speaking his mind seemed the worst of it. Carisi felt as though he had to march up a flight of twisting stairs, then collect, package, and lug each thought to his mouth, evading all the while the hot, wet heat of his drumming heart as it closed in on his sneaking endeavors. 

“Okay, so, a couple days ago--uh, last I saw him, actually--Raf asked why I’d stopped taking interviews… and if I didn’t want to pursue law anymore… and if that was because of something he’d said.”

Carisi winced. The situation sounded juvenile in its retelling, even for wearing all the trappings of drama and intrigue as a live performance.

“Honestly, Carisi, he could have pulled this from a suggestion box. I’d like to know, too.” 

“I said it wasn’t him, but… kind of, yeah. It was.” Carisi knew Barba did not trust his answers, but it was too hard to explain why the truth still wasn’t the worst of what Barba suspected of him. “After Dodds was--its own thing. We needed to stick together.”

Rollins bit her lip. She knew no one would have blamed Carisi for stepping up his job hunt then, much less continuing on as planned, but she was glad for his loyalty. And even under brighter circumstances, neither herself, Fin, nor Benson was in a place to lose another colleague, even for the prospect of bad finger foods and stale sheet cake at a going away party.

“But after _Raf…_ ” Carisi shook his head. Rollins saw a look of bitter anger flash across his face. Rollins still could not pinpoint what he took more personally--the attack on Barba, or the fact that it had been orchestrated by their brothers in blue. 

“That was--you know--clear and present danger. And we weren’t… really together, then, but even after the trial, he still had mild surveillance. He had to let Threat Assessment know he was moving temporarily to his grandmother's old place in the Bronx, and keep them apprised of his apartment search. They searched his new place before he moved in. He got safety checks after that, too. Did he tell you that?”

Amanda held up her hands--hold up, _wait._

“What _the hell_ do you mean you weren’t ‘really together’ when you told him his shirt was ugly and he didn’t _immediately_ crush your windpipe?” Rollins gave him a playful shove. “Don't shit a shitter.”

Carisi smiled, but Rollins knew it was a tremendous effort on his part. He ran a hand through his hair, the movement a nervous response as he sat, uncertain that he should lay out his doubts here. Rollins was his friend, his partner in the field, but she was Barba’s colleague, too. 

“I just thought, after all that, what good is being at the bottom of the totem pole in some law office, when I could carry my badge and gun and maybe actually _do_ something?” 

Rollins watched her friend carefully. For some reason--she attributed it to dimples, mostly--she did not think Carisi faced too many hard truths. She was curious where they would lay for him, real or imagined. 

“You thought there was something more to do after the trial?”

“Amanda,” Carisi sighed, and she was struck by how devastated and tired he suddenly looked. In just that instant, she saw every shock of gray in his hair, every line creeping that much closer to his bright blue eyes, eager to attach themselves and suck dry the life they held. “I thought there’d be a hundred more just like it.” 

She was ashamed, first of all, that she hadn't guessed as much. And sorry, too, because even before his face twisted into a look of mild derision and longstanding tedium, Rollins knew Carisi had some thoughts after Barba’s propensity for being a megaphone for the people’s outrage at life’s many broken systems, and the trouble that lending his voice to their cause saw him into. Barba went there with his head raised high, his steps assured despite the metaphorical firing squad hot on his heels.

And the man could _talk,_ worst of all. That much--like his _big brass… ego,_ as Captain Harris had termed it--preceded him by a country mile. 

Harris had shared with her another word to the wise, when Rollins was less-than-impressed with the bombastic prosecutor’s tongue, sharp as it was to cut clear through the blacks and whites of his worldview.

 _Barba could talk a Quaker into an arms race._

Carisi, who hadn’t been given so much as a fair warning, had seen that much of Barba for a first impression, and likely fell a little bit in love with it. Rollins knew better than to point that out to him, now. Carisi couldn't claim ignorance to the attitudes he’d fawned over in years passed. 

But--a little drunk, a little hurt, a touch confused, and Carisi was doing one hell of an impression.

“It's not like he's particularly careful, you know. Or reasonable. Or… sane. You’ve seen him. There’s the end goal, and there’s him, two points on a line, and he thinks he’s gotta fold reality in on itself to get there. He eggs this stuff on, you know? Sometimes.” 

Carisi knew _why_ Barba felt he had to hasten the journey; that whole _right to a speedy trial_ thing did not always allow him the opportunity to ease the public into unfamiliar legal grounds. He got to those places by demanding others follow him there. Carisi only wished it didn’t mean the leaps Barba took skimmed the raised bayonets of those looking to fashion one with Barba’s own head.

Rollins shrugged one ambivalent shoulder. “He's not scared.”

“Maybe he should be.”

Feeling ashamed and wrong for occupying himself so fully with Barba’s death threats--and unintentionally claiming his place as their champion above the efforts of others--Carisi moved to cover his tracks, saying, “And even now--like, set aside the assassination attempt. Just the day to day. It’s a lot. The responsibility, the _pressure._ I see what it does to him and, geez, no, I don’t want that.” 

He gave a lopsided smile, like he thought that answer would please her enough that she’d excuse it for not being the whole truth. 

“So… your plan is to stick around in case he shoots off his mouth and someone takes exception to it?” Rollins asked, expression falling with something like pity. She thought about the _decades_ he could put into an effort like that, but tried to keep it light, joking, “You thinking of becoming Chief of Police someday?” 

Carisi rolled his eyes in that shy, good-humored way Rollins knew must have stolen a lot of hearts.

One, at least. 

“No,” he said. “But things just kind of… went this way. And--don’t get me wrong. As much as I hate this job, _I love this job._ I’d stay for the rest of my life if I…” 

The thought didn't escape him, but the will to issue it was entirely lost. Carisi felt like his mouth had given up words and only now produced smells. He wondered if Rollins knew a lie by the way it smelled to soil and grit, dug up fresh after being buried for years.

“Sonny,” she said, bestowing his self-determined nickname like an honorific. “You can’t even finish that sentence.”

Rollins did not mean for her observation to render him silent and sorry, though she wasn’t surprised when it did. Carisi was sensitive like that, and for every long stride he’d made as a detective, she guessed it was a problem of his since childhood: hearing concern for disappointment, and blaming himself as the unnecessary cause for either. 

Because she didn't worry that Carisi was losing his edge, that he might take to slacking or--worse--allow his thoughts to come untethered in the field. Duty was chief among his better traits, second only to his resounding goodness. Between the two, Rollins feared nothing with him at her side.

So she allowed herself the luxury of looking upon her friend as just that, which was a rarity for her. People-- _men_ \--always seemed to entangle themselves in her life, becoming enablers, lovers, and villains alike. Even at his most indiscreet, Carisi played the doting caretaker.

 _That_ was a new one. 

Rollins decided with a rap sheet like that, she could chance making Carisi into a confidante.

“It’s okay to feel burnt out,” she said, reaching out with a quiet, tentative word rather than her body. She didn’t doubt Carisi could use a hug--would offer one to her, if their situation was reversed--but decided in that moment it wasn’t _her_ he needed comfort from in that way. 

“It’s okay to wonder what else is out there. Or even--hell--to hate every second of the day, doing what we do.” 

Slowly, Carisi’s gaze lifted from where he’d burned a hole in the shag carpet with it. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Rollins’ hand found his shoulder, and she knocked a bit of sense into him with a playful shove. “On the plus side, I don’t think this has anything to do with Barba.” 

Carisi sort of nodded, the movement dependent on the fact that Rollins was still watching him. It was as though she knew he’d bottled up more than he let on, and she was expecting a greater deluge. 

“Yeah,” he echoed unconvincingly. “Maybe it was just me, doing that.” 

_That lying smile again._ Rollins wanted to wince in sympathy. 

“I haven't been around him so much lately,” Carisi confessed. “I feel like he needs some space.” 

“The guy who’s been texting you all afternoon? He’s the one eager for all this _space?”_

Barba had only texted twice, the second time only a single-word effort to needlessly correct a typo in the first-- _*Warrant._

“It’s just work stuff. Really.” 

Carisi felt confident enough even showing her his phone. Their conversations had been stagnant, dragging like a damaged limb over the past week. 

Rollins accepted the phone, if only to give Carisi one less thing to feel uncertain about. 

Nonetheless, she was sure if he scrolled back a few days, she’d find nothing but their bizarre brand of flirting, the wholesome selfies Carisi liked to send, and _whatever_ Barba’s reaction to them might be. All she knew was that it made Carisi smile, so his jockeying for a good picture was always worth it. 

This, she was certain, was a rough patch. She’d had her share. stories to match, and an eventual conclusion that suited her just fine. Regarding the men that bulldozed or sidestepped into her life, Rollins was better off without them. Doing the inviting herself--and for a stipulated limited stay--proved a far greater return for her limited investment. Hers was a quiet revelation, but Rollins decided such advice would neither meet Carisi well, nor answer his concerns. He had the ADA in such a state Rollins had never seen: at times soft, pliable, and kind. 

And still Carisi wanted more.

If Rollins thought all Barba had left was his sharp edges, she wouldn’t be wrong in thinking Carisi wanted those, too. He seemed remiss to leave anything unclaimed. 

He wanted blindly, Rollins thought, remembering how that attitude served her through her various addictions. Carisi believed--like she had--that he could take it all in and make sense of it, after. The good and the bad, the wins and the losses; somehow, he always believed he’d break even, or come out just that much on top. Rollins remembered as much from the times she went clear over some edge, just to drive another person out to the cliffside with her, and put those hard choices on both their backs, even knowing she’d always give in to hers. 

But what of her opponent? 

What a thrill it had been, to be in danger of knowing another person so fully.

Rollins wondered if Barba wasn’t right keeping the parts of him he knew were sour and ugly off of display, if only to keep Carisi from having too much, too fast. She wondered if she wasn't just excusing her own behavior for seeing it reflected back at her.

This was how she thought about people: in terms of their desires and whether or not they carried intent enough to see them through, and the capacity do so successfully. Barba had the capacity for anything, ranging from foolhardy to ingenious. Instead, it was his intent she questioned, and though Rollins wasn’t one to doubt what she saw with her own eyes, Barba gave conflicted messages.

He’d made himself known in ways that could run roughshod over his carefully cultivated reputation, _true._ And while Rollins thought he’d raised his hand to be counted long ago, he raised it again, and laid it over Carisi’s own, affording the younger man cover as he emerged into that lonely place of exclusion, even for seeking anything but. 

Admittedly, Rollins couldn't say she knew Barba well enough to have whether he’d stand by any kind soul who put themselves on the line, or if Carisi merited his attention all the more. And whether he was content with his choice still vexed her.

Because it was no longer a matter of love versus adoration, but of happiness… and not. 

Granted, happiness was not the end-all and be-all of relations with a man. Rollins knew this well, having channelled varying degrees of lust, boredom, or necessity into the act. She was no purist, and the stars were scrubbed from her eyes long ago. She knew love and happiness were not synonymous, that they needn’t ever touch hands. 

In the right light, they could even be seen for mortal enemies. 

Rollins polished off her beer and waited, curious when Carisi would ask for his phone, palmed as it was loosely in her hand like a temple offering. 

It was as though he’d forgotten it entirely, or preferred his one lifeline to Barba being out of reach. Carisi gestured with his now-empty hands, erecting them like walls to contain his thoughts. Once confined, perhaps he could establish order and sense to them. 

“I just want to have things figured out, you know? For when we’re back to us.”

To stave off any rejoinder from Rollins, Carisi stood and offered to put Jesse to bed. 

_It’s a hassle,_ Rollins used to warn, but Carisi loved the back and forth when Jesse had been so small, so red, and so loud. She wasn’t like that anymore, and Carisi hardly had her in his arms before she dropped off into sleep. He held her a while longer all the same. 

Rollins steadied her hand while he was gone to the other room. She would not search his phone and suss out an answer for him. 

She tapped the home screen once to make quick work of Carisi and Barba’s texts, excusing them from her purview. But doing so left her with perhaps a greater treasure trove: the phone’s wallpaper background. She was met with an image of Barba in dark jeans, a crisp white button-up, and that _godforsaken Boston baseball cap._ His hair was loose, product-free, by the way a few curls licked out around the rim. She read into that, especially. He hadn’t planned to go out, so this little venture was likely Carisi’s brainchild, and if it was as Rollins suspected, Barba was less beholden to a good time than a pleased lover. 

His body was twisted towards the view beyond him, which was shunted in the picture, boasting only a mostly indiscernible array of greenery. The botanical gardens, Rollins realized, remembering some long-ago weekend plans Carisi once mentioned around hour six of a stakeout. Barba’s arm was angled back, holding Carisi’s hand just out of frame.

Rollins smiled, imagining if Carisi had been a second later snapping the picture, he’d have been left with a sour look on Barba's face for being caught in yet another of Carisi’s surprisingly acrobatic--and unsurprisingly cheesy--selfies.

Carisi returned, looking warm and at ease, and Rollins had to bite her cheek to keep from grinning. She had his number down to the extension. 

“How’ya feeling?” Rollins asked, and by the smirk it put on Carisi’s face, she knew she’d fooled him, simple as pie, into taking her honeyed voice and southern charm at face value.

“Pleasantly buzzed.”

He dropped onto the couch, arms loose where they craned out, a veritable wingspan. 

If she wanted--if she dared--Rollins could have tucked in beside him. 

She didn’t; Carisi had made a wide space, not an open one. 

“Enough to say what it is you keep talking around?” she asked, watching the collar of Carisi’s shirt pinch as his posture lost its ease. “I know you, Carisi. Your best, worst ideas come in threes.” She counted them: “Barba doesn’t want a cavalcade of progeny, you don’t know where you want to be career-wise, and…?”

It was by the grace of god that she did not sound off a drumroll on the coffee table.

Carisi would have missed his cue, anyway. 

He drew his arms back, the first step in his _Incredible Shrinking Man_ routine. He stared, first at Rollins like he had been, only to come undone and set himself adrift. He saw through the errant strands of golden hair that jumped off just above her ears, then through the television, carpet, wall--they all fell into view, fell out, even as his attentions were not tethered to his eyeline.

When he answered her, it seemed that was all he did. His voice wasn't hushed, his blue eyes didn't beg understanding. Rather than a friendly confidence, he spoke as if she'd asked his professional assessment of the situation at hand.

He told her what he knew. That he could not make sense of it became readily apparent. 

“What if we’re only together because of all the rough shit. That… we each think we owe the other, as if being there wasn’t all it needed to be.” He exhaled a breath that rattled past his teeth, a ghostly chime. “Except I _don’t_ think that. I don't even really think he thinks that. I just… sometimes I think he could make a really convincing argument, just because, and convince us both.” His eyes, tired of playing over the scene of Rollins’ apartment, fixed themselves on the floor. “Am I crazy?”

Rollins shifted her weight on the couch and moved to rest a hand on her friend’s knee. She thought it might settle him, but he moved at the last instant, shrinking still more, tightening his physical form over the awful notions that stirred within.

“Sometimes, I think because I wanted so much to come out with him, he thinks I won't be okay on my own. I mean, I wouldn't, if we…” Carisi’s face screwed up, like he’d put back the kind of drinks Barba favored, when all he was really good for was the taste he got off the man’s lips. “I wouldn't be okay with that. But in the abstract, too--like I'd change my mind, pack it in, _give up_ if I didn't have proof.”

His phone and his beer were on the coffee table. He grabbed only the latter. 

“I hate thinking this shit,” he said, bitterness the likes Rollins hadn’t known from him forming on his lips like a milky-white foam, the likes they’d both seen early in their careers as beat cops. It was death itself coating tongues, filling throats, and clinging to lips like the tastes of a last meal. 

He might have loosened the sickness’ touch, had he thrown back the rest of his beer. Instead, his voice became very small, and as if his heart had crawled up to lay on his tongue to die and Carisi thought keeping his mouth near-closed would at least temper the smell. 

He professed weakly, “I love him.”

And for as much as he’d had to say in the seconds passed, the floodgates only truly opened then, not to a torrential storm of words, but to resting waters, deep, dark, and infinite.

“And I don't want to ever doubt him. But it's hard, you know, when he keeps doubting me.” 

Thinking of Daniel and the calamitous meeting with his family, Carisi continued, “I know I brought some of that on myself.”

And, “I think I really hurt him.”

Carisi stared a hole into the floor, through the downstairs neighbors and beyond. He felt as though he had a gaping wound to match, except that it cut clean through his heart. But lacking distance didn’t mitigate depth. 

“And if he doesn’t forgive me, _if I said what I did to my parents,_ if they _hate me_ and it’s all for _nothing,_ and _he **never** forgives me--”_ His voice upended itself, and in Carisi’s mind he was transported back to his middle school, to Bobby Bianchi putting his head through a window. His face came back absolutely _shredded,_ and his hairline didn’t fare much better. 

In this moment, much as back then, his voice followed suit: it went to pieces, it cut in and out, and he remembered feeling like such a child, sat in the nurse’s office, a pretty teacher’s aid holding his hand no matter how many time he pulled it from her grasp. 

It all caught up with him, every rationalization and point of pride, every measure taken too far. The high hopes Carisi had, which he now wondered if Barba had always known were delusions, even when he was party to them.

Carisi knew he looked every shade of mortified and sorry. Had he shown such contrition in front of Barba, maybe he’d have something to show for it. Rollins--

Rollins surprised him with a tight embrace. Her arms extended over his shoulders, first, before she brought a hand to cradle his head and guide him towards her. He went, sinking, and without any resistance. 

He wasn’t expecting more than her quiet council.

Except, she spoke to him. In the gentlest tones, so soft they did not so much as disturb the tiny hairs of his cheek and ear, Rollins told him about family and necessity, about drawing lines in the sand and seeing them ruined, and building something for oneself over the wreckage. He listened, rapt. She had a fatherless child, and however small, they were a family. 

“It’s not gonna look like you think,” Rollins told him. “And it’s gonna take a minute.”

She laughed, desperate for the air it necessitated and the levity it promised.

“You’ve got time, Sonny.” 

Children and fathers. Children without fathers, fathers without children. There seemed a great, cavernous divide between what any of them thought about, feared, and wanted. Carisi willed himself into a different headspace, a place of lightness of touch and idling hands doing the touching. 

Carisi mentally shushed himself; he was young yet. There was a lifetime ahead of him to spend figuring where he was and where he wanted to be, and how to set a pair of tandem steps in stylish oxfords to the journey. 

-

_[Where are you]_  
_[And if your answer isn’t my apartment, could it be?]_  
_[Just to, you know, cut the shit.]_

The texts arrived as Carisi turned the corner down the unplowed side street on which he’d find the nearest subway station. He fiddled with his smart watch in a fruitless attempt to know the time--the permeating winter darkness played tricks on a man--but gave up and checked his phone instead. 

It was later than he’d thought, his conversation with Rollins having run well away from him, and for it, looking much like what they’d once had. Back when Rollins was swollen, sweaty, and pregnant, and Carisi finally saw an in for all his doting tendencies. He could bring care packages and cook meals and talk for hours all under the guise of being a do-gooder coworker, yet slowly inching into friendship all the while. It was a wonderful grift. 

_[coming]_ Carisi wrote back, and read into the subsequent radio silence that Barba was surely arguing with himself whether or not to point out that wasn’t what he’d asked.

Carisi forewent the subway and hailed a cab instead. Barba’s explicit want of him lit the proverbial fire under his ass, sparking a wealth of kindling that went towards the idea that Carisi wanted this development. He wanted a reason to return to Barba that wasn't dependant on his feeling ready to do so. He’d have taken anything--a DVR on the fritz, a particularly brazen mouse, _a jar of olives on a high shelf._

The more absurd the reason, the more Carisi hoped for its fruition.

In the back of the cab, he reread Barba’s text as if he thought he’d uncover what wasn’t there to be seen.

Ambiguity wasn’t a game Barba played when he wanted to fuck--evidence Carisi had in droves on his phone, from way back when Barba would text him at nine in the morning, _[Want to fuck?]_ only to follow up with, _[Later, I mean.]_

A common correction after the first time, wherein Carisi was halfway to his office before a second text made it clear he was bored, standing somewhere outside a judge’s chambers, and not actually _DTF._

So Carisi made his way to Barba’s apartment primed only to be soft and agreeable. He didn’t expect to find his lover waiting in bed for him, ready, a breath of ruin about him like Carisi had done. Barba was many things in the bedroom, but never one to wait. Carisi thought that much was sexy in its own right, and did not regret coming home late to find the man pink-faced and warm, self-satisfaction curving his mouth into a daring little smile. 

He guessed only frustration with their loitering existences--not meeting for some time in ways that were especially satisfying--or uncomplicated desire, or some combination of the two. 

His ideas were born out when he arrived to find Barba in slacks and an undershirt, suspenders idling his his sides, drinking and quiet and not particularly wanting of Carisi at all. He scarcely gave the younger man so much as a second glance, which left Carisi smarting even before he’d shed his coat and scarf. 

_Why want me here just to ignore me?_

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

Carisi wet his lips, looked around the room, then back at Barba.

“Are you okay?”

Carisi’s inquiry did not prove pressing enough to keep Barba from the even sip of scotch he’d bent his wrist and raised his chin to meet. Only after he’d swallowed and felt the dull burn sink all the way into his stomach did he answer, “I didn’t have any ulterior motive in wanting you here. I just do. I thought if you were done avoiding me, I’d ask.”

Barba shrugged--an open, flagrant invitation for Carisi to counter the facts of the situation, to claim Barba had texted anything other than he did, or meant anything beyond what he claimed. Carisi had seen him pull the move in court, and knew better than to expect an outcome that did not leave his own self lilting. 

“Okay,” Carisi said, light as he could manage. He conjured up a smile and ran with it. “You don’t have to admit you like that I come when you call. I can read into that just fine from here.” 

He decided in that moment to propel them both onward, to show Barba what was normal and good about their being together on some throwaway weekday night, and prove to himself he had every reason to enjoy their time just the same. Sometimes, they both needed the reminder. 

Carisi elbowed his way into Barba’s fridge, and went about bringing leftovers back to life. There were some take out options, as well as the lasagna Carisi had prepared for Christmas, punctured though it was with individual bites from a single fork.

He went with what was the apparent crowd favorite, even going so far as to add the requisite fried egg--what leftover lasagna was complete without one?--all the while talking up his and Barba’s recent days, though he found himself straining to reach any parts they’d spent together. His cheerful tone inevitably grated against the content of his speech, but Carisi was not deterred.

He took his plate--and one for Barba--to the couch, and joined his partner without preamble. 

“This looks like a heart attack waiting to happen.”

“I put cilantro on it. That’s basically a superfood.” 

There were a few files open on the coffee table, an a notepad littered with more questions than answers. The amount of prep work Barba put in for child victims continued to astonish Carisi. He and his fellow detectives did the work of bolstering a victim’s confidence to tell their truth; Barba did much the opposite, sinking himself and the victim into the worst of the denials, protestations, and attacks. It was arduous work on its own, and Barba found himself preparing not only the victim for the kinds of questions he might face, but preparing himself to explain why an adult might ask these terrible things of her in front of her family, friends, and a room full of strangers.

Carisi didn’t ask why Barba was reviewing a case for which he’d already issued his final arguments. 

He asked, instead, about twelve-year-old Carla Gonzalez.

It was Rollins’ case, with Carisi doing his share of the legwork. He remembered feeling particularly heartbroken when Carla looked at him, green eyes pinched in suspicion, because even for his badge and perfect look of concern, his motivations were not his own to say. 

Carla entered her legal ordeal with her little hands curled into fists. They loosened--slowly--with the undeterred attention and council of SVU, as well as a whole host of support from her family and community. A whip-smart student who won her place in a charter school through a lottery, Carla’s initial silence--and anger--was a product of simple reasoning. Speaking out against a revered educator would likely cost her her place there. 

But the reality spoiled something inside her, and the truth proved too soothing a balm to silence herself again. Through the duration of her court case, Carla’s mother, father, sister, and brothers were steadfast at her side, altogether a show of force. Barba appreciated their presence, and having prosecuted his share of handsome, clean-cut abusers, knew better than to take their attendance for granted.

“She's so funny,” Carisi said, smiling fondly at the memories of Carla trying to distract Barba from trial prep with innocuous questions. “What is she saying, when she goes all rapidfire Spanish on you?”

Barba knew Carisi was referring to when Carla asked about his heritage and his work and his socks, or if he’d read all the books lining his office walls, and if that were the case, she’d have half her school’s library piled into the room she shared with her sister, Josephina, who couldn’t read yet but was halfway through _A Wrinkle in Time,_ if it counted that Carla was the one reading it to her, which Carla decided did, indeed, count. 

Barba chose to answer instead, “Well, Sonny, she's answering the questions I have about her awful and sustained abuse from a man she once liked and respected, who she thought liked and respected her.”

Carisi exhaled a low, slow breath from his nose. He set his plate aside, his appetite lost, even for the several beers sloshing about his empty stomach. He stared dead ahead, not bothering to turn and see that Barba, too, had relinquished his meal, doing so as if he thought it would be taken from him.

“Do you have to do that, to take it to the worst possible place? I know, okay? I know. I see it every day. I wasn’t doing anything other than asking after a little kid. You don’t need to put me in my place for that.”

“I’m sorry,” Barba said, a quiet admission covering his tone and his cruelty. “But _come on._ I tell you I don’t want children and suddenly you don’t talk to me for a week? I don’t see you, except in the precinct? Really?”

Barba stared hard at Carisi who, beset by either his anger or shame--a distinction of little importance--could not turn to face his partner.

The distance, silence, and unplanned reunion proved a bad combination. Barba felt sour after his aborted attempts of putting his heart where Carisi held his, ashamed for his lack of compassion, and indignant that he had been coaxed into considering such a prospect at all. He was of half a mind to pin it all down on Catholicism, his and Carisi’s both. 

The growing discord between them deserved a monumental source--the kind with its own city, even. 

And Carisi, for feeling anxious for the space he’d put between himself and his family, could not very well deny it. He was scared, too, because it had only been a matter of days since delivering an ultimatum to his parents. He thought how Barba had waited out _decades_ for the eventual thaw, and did not want that for himself.

He needed to hurry this along. 

That much made Barba a poor example, so Carisi had looked elsewhere for guidance. There was Rollins and Jesse, a unit of such radical strength, having drawn itself from nothing into everything. 

And there was Bella, Tommy, and the baby that ushered them back in from the cold with all the pomp and circumstance of an awards ceremony. Beatrice was a revelation; there was no denying her as a symbol of her parents’ love for one another. 

That’s when their parents understood. 

Carisi swallowed, but the lump if his throat was persistent. Months old now, it had refined itself, polishing into a awful little pearl he could not manage to dislodge, not for every word of adoration he laid on Barba, to him or for him. Not for every kiss and promise. Arguments and shouting matching couldn’t cough it up. Carisi was stuck with it, this disease symptomed by shame and inhibition. 

So it came back around to children, imagined and otherwise. Neither man was surprised. Barba, in particular, wasn’t especially generous with his impression. He thought Carisi thought _he thought_ he carried it over him like an awful stink, unwashed from his hair and skin, _like he’d rolled around in it._ It wasn’t so far off, really. 

For his own, Carisi only knew it for being so apparent on his heart that none who got close--Barba, getting closest--could hope to avoid it. 

Carisi had been given an answer he no longer disputed, though he still believed some further reasoning--some _context_ \--would help appease the hurt he felt, and maybe dissuade him of the unconscious conclusion that Barba’s decision was overwhelmingly influenced by Carisi himself. 

He admitted as much, taking each word like a sorry step into standing water: old, awful, and best avoided. 

_It’s my family,_ he wanted to say, but couldn’t. Maybe Barba would be more inclined to forgive Carisi’s imaginings, thinking them wild, and not the very real issue of a man facing down a dwindling well of options. 

“Okay, maybe… yeah, you’re not wrong. I just… I think I need this. I need to hear it. I need to know the why.” The words seemed to fold over themselves. Carisi pictured them for a pile of corpses, fresh enough to be mistaken for bodies, but fast growing cold, stiff. “I’m sorry.” 

Barba wanted to shout he had been trying, or at least trying to try. But he was too tired for all that--the _truth,_ and nothing but. He dragged it out of people for a living, and knew by example that trotting over it was infinitely less painful. 

There was a time--all of five minutes, he was sure, spent in bed and wrapped fitfully around his adoring lover--that Barba thought maybe they could consider it, maybe _he_ could consider it, well down the line, as Carisi was surely already there, gamely and happily. He was being made happy; was his instinct wrong, then, to want the same for Carisi? 

But the idea found him unwell at every apparition, and Barba could not commit to even suggesting it aloud. Subsequent attempts were useless as he tried to convince himself that the neediness of children touched him deeper than his own disinterest, trepidation, and fear.

He donated to a few charity funds, but such was the extent of his efforts. He told Carisi none of it, lest the dew in his hope-struck eyes cause him to mistake guilt and pity for growing interest. 

The thought found him later--and again, in bed, always in bed, with his mind at rest, even if his body was not--that a broader life with all the trappings may be the only way to keep Carisi by his side, despite the younger man’s protestations that he hadn’t drawn any such line.  
It would be his fault, Barba realized. Always. His shortcomings would number the days Carisi could hope to stand him, nevermind his impassioned declaration of three years.

It hurt all the more knowing Carisi would deny it now, and again, and every day until he didn’t, and sound so very much like he meant it all the while.

“My answer is no,” Barba said, lightly and simply, even as the sentiment threatened to tear through the walls of his heart. “And if there was no why, would that be the final straw for you? Would you give up any sooner?” 

Carisi closed his eyes, grit his teeth, and said nothing.

“You’re upset,” Barba said, like it was something that had just dawned on him, though his awe was the product of the reality of his own stubbornness seemingly having just dawned on _Carisi._

“Yeah, I am.”

“And annoying.”

“Annoyed.”

“Slip of the tongue.” 

If they were in bed, if Barba’s voice was more teasing than cruel, Carisi would have slipped off and away, dragging the sheets with him enough to leave Barba bare, too. 

It was Barba’s mind that thought entered--a fantasy, because he had been neither teasing nor bed-ridden.

“You make these massive decisions about us, and keep them to yourself.” Carisi did not lob his whole accusation at once; he started slow, drawing each sorry word from the pits of his heart before he had himself a fistful. “I can understand if you don’t want a family, but not wanting a _partnership_ \--that’s kinda new.”

“Well _listen to you,_ Mother Theresa.” Barba’s drawl was as crushing as Carisi’s most daring insult, because Barba didn’t need to try, and Carisi never quite had the same purchase on words. “Did you rescue a bus full of orphans on your way to that point?”

All the same, his anger was cheap. A few smart words were all Barba had to spend, as he wanted to be brief and mean and satisfying in just this moment. 

“Or do you want to give a rundown, maybe, of all the parts of yourself you had to kill to be with me?”

Barba saw the twitch of Carisi’s lip, the flutter of activity under closed eyelids as he rolled his eyes. He’d have rather been party to the bold-faced action, instead of the slice of Carisi’s head as he turned on his heel, probably mouthing a fully exasperated _Oh my God_ to the far wall as he did. 

“Why can't you give me this?”

 _“Give you this?”_ Barba bit too hard into the words, gnashing his teeth in the process. The sentiment was nothing like the red meat he wanted, but he gnawed and struck bone all the same. “What else haven't I given you? What spoils do you lack, your highness?” 

Barba’s caustic tone had gone darker still, each word eclipsing the light Carisi offered him with every passing--shrinking, now?--opportunity to give in, to surrender. To be kind.

Barba refused, and it was like letting himself sweat and sleep and go for days without washing. He’d done that a few times in his life, stepping clear of his consciousness and doing only what his physical body required of him. Zero exposure did not suit him well--nor did the silence and loneliness of a life that allowed it. He feared being seen in such a state, but in its making, Barba had felt somehow insurmountable. 

He felt some semblance of that, now, as Carisi turned red-faced and ashamed.

For a moment, Barba was ecstatic. Finally, his point had been received. Finally, Carisi understood nothing was as joyous as he hoped, and that he’d long confused _hoping_ for _planning,_ and neither was enough when dealing with the petty grievances of others. All that satisfaction that filled Barba suddenly bottomed out, leaving him desolate. 

He’d been hoping, too. 

When Barba found Carisi’s gaze, he saw was surprised that Barba looked very much the same as he. 

“Sorry.” 

The word escaped from below his tongue, floated up in a pocket of air. Neither man said anything, sinking as they were in revelation, not truth.

“I didn’t mean… that.”

He took a breath, even if he knew deep down the scotch would make faster work of settling his nerves.

“Maybe… explain to me what you want to know.”

“You want some leading questions?”

“Consider me a hostile witness.” 

Carisi was quiet as he slunk back from all the nastiness--Barba’s and his own--and chose, bravely, to put forth his heart instead. Barba could practically see it: a bruised, twinging thing, aching with each requisite beat.

“Have you ever thought about it?” Carisi asked, gently enough that Barba registered the new tone for an old sentiment, could not coincide the two, and, as a result, did not immediately dismiss him. “Like, really. Before. With someone else. Yelina, even.”

If Barba had any notion Carisi wasn’t projecting himself into every question he had-- _When was your life different? When were your hopes higher?_ \--the mention of Yelina Muñoz was a resounding answer to the contrary.

But he nodded, an indication as slight as any that he understood and meant to answer. 

He just--

Needed a moment.

“She had a pregnancy scare when we were together, and _both of us,”_ Barba stressed this point: there was togetherness in the other side of that particular determination, and couples shared in it every day. “We knew. It wasn’t for her, with me. Not then, not ever. We made plans to that effect. Do you understand?” 

Carisi nodded, too, yet somehow wore the gesture differently. 

“False positive on the test.” 

Barba noted privately that the lie became easier to tell himself each and every time he told it to someone else. 

In fact, Yelina had miscarried two days after scheduling the abortion, and Barba borrowed a car and drove down to the City to be with her a week earlier than he'd planned. He didn’t tell his mother he would be in town, nor anyone else. They got a nice hotel room Barba could scarcely afford, and alternatively laid together in bed in silence or, in Yelina’s case, quiet sobbing. And Barba had cried, too, ashamed of his part in her pain, and sorry for whatever had been lost between them--not yet a baby, but undoubtedly something.

In the morning, as Yelina stood aimlessly in the shower, Barba joined her, but only to help her wash. Afterward, when he patted her dry and started to comb through her straight black hair--the envy of the neighborhood girls, and styled in a way that had gone unchanged for decades. He was careful of every stroke so as not to cause her still more undue anguish. Sitting behind her, cherishing her beauty with the kind of focus to rival only that to which he’d applied to his studies, she told him she loved him.

It had been the first time she said that. She said it to him a lot more when their relationship stumbled onto its last legs, and ultimately gave out.

Barba wondered when, if ever, he’d be compelled to correct himself, like he had about his relationship with Alex. Or did Carisi already have him figured for a liar?

“And you never thought about it again?”

“Once was enough,” Barba said. “I told you, I know myself, my strengths and my limitations. I don't think this falls into either category. It just doesn't rate for me at all.” He searched Carisi’s pinched posture, his knitted brow, for any inroads clear for the taking. He saw none, and kept halted at this crossroads. “I can't tell anymore, whether you're disappointed or… distressed.”

“It's just--” with surprising force, Carisi threw himself towards the latter. “I can’t have _my_ family, I can’t have a family with _you_ \--I’m just some weird… hanger-on.” 

Barba felt a headache press its weight against the backs of his eyes. An abundance of pressure rolled in, as if from a far-away storm, all of it gathering and twisting in an effort to claim the best real estate. 

“No one said you can’t have your family,” he sighed. “Whatever you thought I said--”

 _”They did.”_ Carisi snapped the words like he meant to put them in a plaster cast. The moment Barba straightened to attention, eyes opened, Carisi shrank down again, muttering, “Thanks for the advice, by the way.”

“Oh. Sonny…”

The room became too-bright, which was either a side effect of a coming migraine or the earth-shattering force with which Barba felt he’d collided into Carisi’s world. Family, in all the ways he did not much care for, now occupied the whole of him. His brain took to firing on all cylinders, trying to suss an answer for the vast, near-impenetrable problem Carisi had dropped dead in the center of the apartment, claiming it for a mausoleum. The carcass fell, and the whole room shook. 

“I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay?” Bitterness found Carisi as surely as though he’d drank it from Barba’s glass. “Maybe later when you can, you know, try and sound surprised.” 

Carisi’s retort took layers off his skin, and Barba nearly raised a hand to graze his cheek, where he feared he wore the worst of the damage.

Barba’s gaze dropped into the sink and swam around a bit before rising back up to find Carisi’s. 

“Should we renegotiate terms?”

Carisi shook his head tiredly. The reduction of himself and Barba and all they shared to a mere matter of _terms_ made him physically weak. 

_Not this again,_ he thought, and with some compunction, _Not this again **ever.**_

“You know, for someone with one foot in the closet for so long, you’re giving yourself a lot of outs.”

Carisi’s wording was sharp, but the delivery arrived as tedious and unimpressive as junk mail. By its content or its warped execution, Barba was stunned into a brief silence, his mind lagging behind an explanation of either.

“Oh, sweetie,” he dropped the phrase with an unnatural thud. “You don’t honestly think you’re going to end--let alone _win_ \--any argument on a _pun,_ do you?”

“No, but it shut you up for a minute there.” Carisi was so bold as to give a weak little grin. “I like when you call me sweetie.”

“Not a term of endearment in this context. No.”

“Um, it’s literally only a term of endearment, always.” 

“Trust me. No.” The heat in his voice was all but gone. Barba spoke and his words were cool water over soft stone. He was tired, and weary, and consequently unbothered by matters of his heart or anyone else’s. With heartache, he grew cruel, and doubled his share. 

“I’m not having this farce of a conversation again. Why don’t you tell it to yourself on the subway ride home.” 

“Raf--”

“I mean it.” 

Carisi’s next breath hid behind the backs of his teeth. Every argument had for so long felt like a near-miss, he’d failed to heed the warning signs. He’d gone too far, and where he’d slipped from his noose in the past, maybe Barba had cut its slack in all the time spent going back and forth, granting mercy and not. 

It was but one moment staggered tenuously on the backs of a thousand others. One moment that Carisi had misjudged, and the whole thing came crumbling down. 

Carisi recognized his poor timing; Barba was irate already, and every response was that much more cruel by virtue of his addled conscience. 

And maybe Barba had cracked open a bit, because Carisi saw something else, too.

“Okay, so maybe I didn’t have the worst day between the two of us.” Carisi didn’t plead. He only observed. “What happened?”

All the armoured skin sloughed off, leaving both men naked in their assumed argument. Barba was--again--more than a touch stunned by the development. He’d taken that hard turn and gone careening off a cliff, yet when his scream died and the dust settled, he was right back on its edge, unharmed. Barba still considered domesticity to be a minor miracle. 

He ducked his head, looking sidelong and away. Carisi followed his gaze, a kind of silent commiseration on whatever it was Barba still refused to tell him.

“I’m sorry. I may have had too much to drink,” Barba said, a dull excuse for his rudeness, but never the cause.

“Shock of a lifetime,” Carisi teased, catching himself a second too late. “Aw, geez. That was mean.”

“And quick,” Barba observed, and still it surprised Carisi the things he didn't take personally as opposed to those he did. Carisi had mouthed off a genuinely thoughtless word, and Barba could consider it like it was never intended for him. 

“That a thought you have on hand so often, you don't have to reach for it?” 

“No, Raf. And you know that. You just--” 

“Want to start another fight? Maybe I'm due.”

“It's been all of twenty seconds and you just apologized to _me.”_

Carisi rubbed his face, sighed. Sometimes arguing with Barba was easier because Barba invited it, wanted it. He liked the game in the bedroom as surely as in open court.

But what he _needed,_ and what transformed him from a deadly wit to an unfathomable kindness was that same kindness being shown to him.

“I love you,” Carisi said, and felt unburdened. He repeated it twice more, and somehow managed not to sound like he was convincing either himself or Barba of that fact. He played it like a song, soft and familiar. “I feel like it haven't said that lately. Since Christmas, maybe.”

“And thus the curse was laid?” Barba’s attempt at a joke went completely unnoticed. “No, I know,” he said, watching Carisi summon a weak smile by way of reply. “I don’t often forget it.”

“I know that’s good for something. For you. For anyone.” 

Carisi took a walk that didn’t lead him anywhere in particular. He touched the throw on the back of the couch, which Barba never used but always folded after Carisi wrapped himself up in it. He seemed to wear it like a cape any time spent under the lunar reflection of the television screen in a darkened apartment, or early mornings, when he refused to dress himself until the last possible second.

The throw never made its way to the bedroom; Carisi would shuck it off long before then. He wanted nothing between himself and Barba, not cotton undershirts or socks, and certainly not the weight and warmth of a wool blend in a charming chevron pattern. 

Carisi’s hand abandoned the blanket, and to police himself, Carisi stood apart from anything with which he could distract himself. He refused to require a crutch for a conversation with his partner. He fixed Barba with an empty-handed, clear-eyed gaze that allowed neither of them any relief. 

“I can’t figure out why you seem so miserable, and it guts me. All the time, Raf. What is it? How can I help?”

Barba didn’t know. He felt himself shift--just bones and muscle and blood--under his skin. Remnants of his liquid dinner coated his tongue and painted the backs of his teeth, and Barba wondered, mortified, if he was exactly as Carisi claimed, even for never quite seeing himself as such. This sad, tragic figure.

It was more than thinking he’d always hid those parts of himself well. For months now, Barba had thought he was _happy._

He knew he couldn't answer for his whole self--what surer way to drive Carisi off than with his unrepentant honesty?--so Barba narrowed it down. Why was he made miserable _today?_

“It’s not _you._ It’s _never_ you.”

Barba sounded almost disappointed in that fact. 

Meanwhile, Carisi was sick with the thought that his anxieties were glomming onto Barba, who had thrown all that off decades ago, and was not inoculated against this new strand of hyper-desperation and self-degradation. Scared shitless that there was no dark cloud over Barba, just Carisi’s own looming shadow, Carisi went for broke. 

“I'll stop,” he said, a sharp declaration amidst the fog of what seemed to be dissipating between them. “I swear it, I will stop with the questions. I don't need anything so bad as to make you feel like shit all the time.”

Barba knew why his ears were ringing with embarrassment, why the first bite into an argument tasted so good, why he went back for seconds and thirds. All this turmoil and upset in a matter of minutes, their dinner discarded but still hot, Carisi’s face still red with cold from outside--it had one simple, ready source. 

He was ashamed of himself, a thing, a _practice_ that he had spent a lifetime trying to unlearn. That it could find him again so easily, that he should accept and harbor it like a newfound addiction, and hide it from his lover and use ruin to obscure its discovery--was _terrifying._

And Barba knew terror.

He knew it couldn’t be snuffed out like a flame under a lid of silence. It had to be fought out in the open, with blistering sunlight. 

“One of the jury members followed me after court,” Barba said, the words as rushed as he could make them. “And asked me out. I had to tell Judge Bertuccio.”

Carisi’s reception was mixed. First there was a smile, tugged higher on one side with busementment and lagging, elsewhere, with relief. As quickly as it emerged, however, Barba saw it disappear. He watched instead as Carisi as registered every tangential thread of that particular event: how Barba felt sick for being followed, then affronted for feeling scared, embarrassed for discussing it with a judge, and again, now. Carisi’s gaze did not have the flit like one in a swarm of fireflies to the amber scotch not yet drained from Barba’s glass. He could smell as much on the man’s breath. It marinated his every word.

Carisi stepped to Barba and drew him close before the man could utter a word of protest. 

He returned to the hits, asking, “Are you okay?” 

Barba only huffed, annoyed, against Carisi’s chest.

Carisi pulled back and offered another smile, this one softer, sweeter. The kind of smile for winning hearts and breaking them in quick succession. 

“After the fact, it’s kinda funny.”

He didn’t mean it; he only said the words as a means to get Barba talking again. The trick seemed to be the cause of a lot of their problems, but when played for a winning hand it was useful, too. 

“Judge Bertuccio didn’t think so. Of course Rita found it all endlessly entertaining.” 

“I bet jurors fall for you all the time.” 

“If they do, they have the good sense not to make a scene.” 

The one who had approached him--Juror 9, as Barba had known him, who ultimately gave the unwelcome introduction of himself as _Jason_ \--was sweet-faced, but that he put his own idle interests ahead of a little girl’s criminal case made Barba hate him outright. 

“So now there’s that, even though we did our closing arguments, and--” Barba found himself pacing. He moved as though he could escape his nerves with a well-placed stride, a quick turn on the ball of his foot. “I get the feeling he’ll let it slide, but I don’t know yet. I don’t know what he will do, what the jury will do, what Rita will do if this doesn’t go her way--”

Carisi felt like he was chasing Barba, even for only taking a few sure steps to crowd and corner him. 

“Whoa, wait, all this because some juror thinks you’re hot?”

“...and he might have offered to sway the room my way.”

“Oh.”

“Which makes it all seem more nefarious than it is. I only want a juror to do that for nothing in return.” A heated grimace parading like a smirk over Barba’s face. “What am I making an effort for, after all?” 

“Hey. Relax.” Carisi went to collect Barba’s hands, taking the long way down the warm swells and soft hollows of Barba’s biceps, forearms, and wrists. All that real estate laid out for him, and still Carisi could not reach his one destination. Barba denied him by shelving his hands on his hips, pinching at the weight there and digging limp suspenders into his sides as he turned fitfully away. Carisi watched, exasperated, his hands empty and useless. “Why didn’t you tell me all this before I went in on you?”

 _And play the losing hand of your own game? Why would I?_ Barba thought bitterly, and said--

“Why _would I?”_

No moment of personal failure was so grave that Barba couldn’t throw an arm out to do some added damage going down. 

His dig at Carisi’s earlier plays at obfuscation was something he wholeheartedly expected would leave a mark, landing cold across Carisi’s face before turning it hot with shame. Barba waited to be made to feel like the bully, the only one with any claim to the day’s mistakes. He’d shoulder every bit of unnecessary blame and turn it around inside himself, using it for fuel to feed his ambitions, wild and staggering as they were. 

Except Carisi didn’t look hurt, unduly or not. He only said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll take that.”

Like receding flood waters, Barba’s anger petered out, leaving his pride a streaked and sodden mess.

Carisi closed in on Barba again, staking out a space into which he could reach out his hand and take Barba’s just as easily. His touch was gentle, but deep down Carisi was focused. He knew he held his whole world with just his fingertips, and he’d sooner lose his grip on a cliff’s edge than the soft expanse of Barba’s palm.

“I just didn’t need it, you know? With this case. With any of them. Of all the things that go wrong bringing a she-said, he-said-she’s-mature-for-her-age to trial--” Barba took back his hand in an effort to proctor both into a kind of floating wall, each positioned on the ends of a simple idea, as if to keep it from darting out of his grasp. 

Were Rollins in the room, had she seen the gesture mirrored between the two men merely hours apart, she would have wondered who was the trendsetter, and who was dancing in the other’s steps. 

Wondered, but only briefly. She would have quickly dismissed the notion that these two men, who shared a mutual love of law, justice, and one another, couldn’t have also found in common something as simple as a nervous gesture. 

(The _field day_ she’d have if only she knew about their serendipitously shared preference for paperback over hardcover, milk not cream in their coffees, and granny smith apples above all other varieties.) 

Barba’s hands gave up the idea he couldn’t quite frame. When they broke, fingers falling open and lax, the words tumbled out just the same.

“Just-- _fuck that guy.”_

In the exhaustion radiating off the spent heat of Barba’s commentary, Carisi caught a glimpse of the man’s more tender nature. Carisi forgot it, sometimes, given the coolness Barba afforded himself in court, the wit he exuded in company both desired and not. He made himself up to stand above the pettiness, a surveyor of the horse race, not a participant. In truth, he was as beat up from the games as anyone. He stood himself apart in that he chose to match his tie to his bruises. 

He was remarkably sensitive when it came to his work and responsibilities, and became understandably flustered when some stranger disregarded them outside the arena in which Barba could counter every punch. 

“Fuck that guy,” Carisi agreed, and let Barba sulk. At least for the time being, the man would remain unmoved from his stance of utter contempt for the situation, and the whole day that permitted its happening. 

Carisi had scarcely seen Barba like this--petulant, small--and for good reason. Of the mistakes Barba made in court, none were so grievous that he wasn’t quick enough to recover, sometimes in little more than a quick redirect, other times, with a day of thought put to the matter. He always seemed to know he could manage those things, or was smart enough to look like he thought so. Practiced effort or not, Carisi envied the presence of mind Barba had to keep up the game.

This was different. 

This was something he’d handled quickly, then worried after for propriety’s sake. And for simply being the one to say so, he felt like he was courting blame.

In what he hoped would result in a return to calm, a demonstration of yet another facet of their relationship--their love of, need for, and use of one another--Carisi did his due diligence. He was sweet, affording Barba soft touches and calming silence. This was what his partner needed, and Carisi was happy to comply. He wrapped Barba in his arms and tried to radiate serenity. 

Perhaps despite himself, Barba _did_ relax. He did this with Carisi’s help, closing his eyes and feeling the warmth and weight of a familiar hand drag itself across the length of his forearm, sometimes stalling around his wrist before scampering back up for a taste of bicep. It did not escape Barba that Carisi meant to keep him close. They both knew Barba’s tried and true method was somehow still preferable. 

“I need another drink,” Barba said--a thing of no surprise. Carisi kept him, however, wrapped up in his arms and drawn close to his chest. Barba leaned against him, head-first, like a retired workhorse might insist upon his master. He’d lived too long to fear the slaughterhouse, and knew his caretaker for a soft heart. 

“I’ll get it,” Carisi said, but did not move. He kissed the top of Barba’s head and settled more comfortably in his one-sided embrace.

“...When?” 

Barba pulled away and took the long, necessary steps out of Carisi’s grasp, then fixed himself a drink.

“You don’t want to be my replacement for anything,” Barba told Carisi when he caught the other man looking disaffected by the move. 

“And you know that, huh? You know what I want.”

Carisi spoke with surprising fortitude and Barba--already on his second sip--had to swallow it. 

The moment soured. 

“I just want things to change.”

By the stricken look Barba tried--and failed--to keep from worrying his brow and making pinholes of his eyes, Carisi realized he had more power than felt natural in his hands. 

Barba felt tremendous pressure to meet Carisi’s expectations, lest he risk being dropped by the wayside. Carisi didn’t know how to make him understand that was his worst nightmare: not just for their relationship to end, but for Barba to think Carisi ever wanted it to.

“What things,” Barba asked slowly, pointedly not looking at his glass but knowing exactly how near it was to his lips, “What do you want, exactly?”

The open, dazed expression on Carisi’s face did not match with the necessity twisting up his voice like fishing line, cutting each breath he took to ribbons. With his explanation, Carisi threw his heart across the room, only to bound over furniture and decor to reach it again. 

“I want to go to bed with you,” he said, the first, most pressing thing that played successfully off his tongue. He _ached_ with desire for it, the intimacy he’d always wanted, even before every indistinct notion shed its fantastical nature, unveiling itself to be the softest of realities. “I want to sleep like the dead and wake up… a little before you, or a little after. I want to see you, like that. I want to be seen…” 

Carisi choked on the rest. In this moment of weakness, he realized if Barba did not hear him now, perhaps he never would.

“I look at you and I see the rest of my life. Not the details, but I can see being happy. I can feel it. And it doesn’t seem like the craziest thing that could happen.” Carisi seemed to be _vibrating_ with excitement, there--that something as mythical as love could feel, at once, inexplicably achievable and wholly mundane. “I’m real… I’m scared right now. Things aren’t great. But they’re gonna be, with you, ‘cause how could they not?” 

Carisi sort of steadied himself, one hand flinging out to grip the back of one of two of Barba’s wingback armchairs. His fingers bit like incisors into the plush leather. 

“So, that’s that.”

Barba was more than a little awestruck. This man, for who, he had somehow fallen for so as to known the ends of the earth for the trip, was no operator. He was not especially sly or carnal or ghastly in all the ways Barba relished being, himself, from time to time. 

But goddamn if he wasn’t every bit as confident as Barba ever oriented himself to be in a courtroom, achieving the persona even without a gorgeous suit or wit’s murderous double-edged sword. 

“You seem awfully sure of yourself,” Barba muttered, keeping his head down so as not to give himself away for being impressed. 

“Yeah,” Carisi said, just as easily. “It’s that look on your face. Kind of kills the suspense.”

Barba raised his glass again, just inches off the counter. A threat or an invitation, and Barba surprised himself hoping to be received as the latter. Maybe Carisi would press up beside him, warm with intent. Maybe he would laugh this all off, have a drink or share Barba’s, and they could ignore their pain a little longer.

Or, Barba supposed, he could be the one to make a move. 

He swallowed dry, leaving his scotch untouched. 

“It’s a very nice thought.” 

Carisi inched that might closer. 

_Invitation, then._

“I’m sorry I pushed you and my family together,” he said. By his careful tone, Barba figured him for having run his hands over the words a few times, confronting them, feeling their grooves. 

He continued, “They weren’t ready. And I, uh, I wanted it to work more than I had reason to expect it would.”

Barba didn’t gloat. He didn’t raise his voice, much less the gaze. “We should probably talk about that.”

“Not right now. Please.” Carisi matched him, sorry plea for sorry plea. “I know you get it.” 

Barba’s head shot up as if the wrinkle between his brows was fixed with a bit of string, which was threaded through a ceiling-bound pulley, and somewhere, some crouching figure gave it a tug. Barba stared at Carisi with wide, unsettled eyes. There was more focus held there, in those green expanses held between twin sets of dark lashes than Carisi thought was befitting a man with Barba’s blood alcohol levels. 

It was eerie, to be seen in that way--in one’s own totality. 

Carisi had always envied that ability in Barba, even for having some semblance of it in his own arsenal, as a detective. For Barba, it was as though the capacity for seeing things as they were grew alongside him his entire life, slowly shifting to stand dead ahead, becoming a lens through which he saw the world. Stripped of all other trappings, the world became a very uninteresting place for Barba, who chose instead to enter courtrooms and minds, and suss out the failings there.

Carisi did not know if it was pity that gripped Barba, and bound his attention in that moment, or likeness, or confusion. What he knew without reservation was that he was not entirely comfortable being _seen._ He wanted to admit that--it was what Barba wanted to hear, after all--but Carisi wanted so much more for it not to be true that he held it, hid it, one failure laid beside another. 

“I do,” Barba agreed softly. “I’m sorry if I--” _Wrong,_ he caught himself, and started again. “I’m sorry for only telling you… by my example… only half the story. What had to be done, not how I felt doing it. I misled you.” 

This cavalcade of apologies was not their usual call-and-response. Nor was it usual that Barba would be the one who rearranged himself, who left his scotch and the neat fortress posed by his bar countertop, to meet his folly head-on, and without prestenses. 

Barba touched him gently, longingly. Just a hand cupping Carisi’s cheek, fingers curling along his ear, thumb smoothing over Carisi’s bottom lip. He could have dug in, opened Carisi’s mouth, stolen a kiss--but this wasn’t that kind of apology. 

This was the man he’d wanted and got. The man he’d come to love and adore. 

And so a lone and obscure thought struck Barba then--that he missed his old apartment, if only because he would never again see Carisi in it, exactly as he had been that first time. So willful and ready, quietly starved as he searched for Barba’s tormentors in every corner of the apartment, before taking the more proactive approach, playing protector. Playing friend, playing lover, until he was all those things without having to speak their name. And Barba had made him so _full._

There were no assailants hiding in Barba’s home that first night; Barba was besieged only by loneliness, but Carisi wasn’t particular. He fought that away, too. 

Barba drew back his hand and replaced its soft presence with another spoken apology, this one tracing its roots back to that first rotten seed. It was a thing that hurt him now to say, in part because he wasn’t expecting to genuinely feel at fault. 

“I know… I’ve disappointed you. And I can’t mollify that. I can’t make it hurt any less for you. I wish I wanted it. I wish I could lie to myself and believe it, just to get me there.”

“Stop,” Carisi murmured, heartbroken. 

“You keep asking,” was Barba’s gentle reminder. 

“No, _stop_ \--don’t look at me like you think it’s the last time you ever will. Don’t touch me like that, either.” Carisi wet his lips to slicken his argument’s passing; there wasn’t a moment to waste. “This isn’t over, _it just started.”_

What followed was a slow, wordless dance. Carisi, seeing Barba squint against the light, then reorient himself-- _just so_ \--and focus himself, figured a migraine had snuck up on him. He moved to lead Barba to the couch, where Carisi sat first and to one side. Barba went down only once prompted, and slowly, and with Carisi’s gentle guidance, he drew his legs up and bent them to fit along the couch’s length. He kept on his side until laying his head in Carisi’s lap. 

And Barba would wonder, for the rest of his natural life, how a thing like that could stir through reality and just _happen._

Carisi wondered why it couldn’t happen all the more. 

He stroked his lover’s hair, wishing there was more he could do, or achieve, towards a substantive way in which to alleviate Barba’s pain.

“Maybe I got ahead of myself. It’s only been a year--”

“You know what you want. Don’t let me--or anyone--tell you any different.” 

How Barba could manage to keep his voice as sterling steel when crumbled in a heap over Carisi’s lap was something like a miracle--an ugly one, the kind that don’t get talked about or written into holy books. 

Carisi likened to best to survival in a vegetative state.

Carisi gave a dissatisfied hum. 

“Stop arguing,” he said. “Just relax a minute. Maybe it’ll go away.”

“It’s not a bad one,” Barba murmured, his version of _I'm feeling a little better, but I know not to stake a claim on my own well-being._

He could feel a lot of things; that did not mean any of them were permanent or sacred. Barba learned as much at his kitchen table, a gun held to his temple, his skin crawling with such fervent life despite the growing promise that he’d soon be without it.

Therapy was meant to disentangle those notions, to set them back on their rightful twin tracks of risk and reward. 

Christ, it took up a good three pages of the workbook.

Privately, Barba knew he wouldn’t call himself cured of those delusions, and he knew, too, they had deeper roots than a year-old assassination attempt. 

He’d grown up fighting with his back against the wall. He’d take what was delivered to him, without a thought towards consequence--the man throwing the worst swings never seemed to face any of those. There was _only_ risk.

When Barba seemed agreeable, Carisi began to unbutton his shirt and slacks. Barba didn't make any cracks about Carisi jumping the gun on makeup sex; his partner’s efforts were too tender by half, and there was nothing in his touch but the kind desperation of the hapless. He opened Barba’s shirt and managed to twist and tug it off Barba’s still-reclining form. It was mothering, his work, and had Barba grown up with a mother who had time to pity him between all the survival she did on his behalf, he might have acknowledged as much. 

The backrub--focusing on his neck and shoulders--fell in line with the rest, until it didn’t, and Carisi had all but given up the guise of wanting anything but to put his hands on Barba’s warm skin.

“Not to put ideas in your head, but where am I gonna go? You think I can have my pick of all the gorgeous, brilliant, kind, smarmy, queer ADAs in the five boroughs?”

Carisi couldn’t quell the grin that blossomed over his face as Barba buried his head purposefully--and shamelessly--into his lap. 

“Of the four of us, sure.”

“Oh, no, which borough is bereft?”

“Queens, ironically enough.” Barba turned his head and gave Carisi a smart look. “He met the one in Brooklyn.” 

“Hey, are they a part of the gay lawyer cabal you’re always on about?”

“One joke, made once, to literally only you, and yet you continue to bring it up in mixed company, as if we all watched my Netflix special.” 

A chuckle teetered out of Carisi’s chest, soundless, but not without its trademark warmth.

“You’re not uncomfortable, talking into my zipper?”

“What a gentlemanly way of asking to remove your pants.” Barba nosed that much more against Carisi’s groin. His headache, if not passing, was at least bearable. “No, I like a challenge.” 

Under any other circumstances, the line would have drawn a wider grin from Carisi, or teased out a response just as guileful. All that Carisi saw fit to share with a soft smile, caught between relief and temptation. Had they not been seconds away from utter disaster, not moments ago? 

(An _hour_ Carisi would realize later, with a healthy dose of shock. He’d spent an hour with Barba in near-perpetual silence, cradling his head, watching him breathe, wondering at his heart.)

The willingness they each had to venture back, to give up every inch of higher ground in service to the other’s argument--if only just to keep them arguing that much longer--was what kept Carisi from coming completely apart. Disagreements hadn’t concerned him, to start, but what followed soon after began to gnaw at his resolve. He feared the same threads of unhappiness and disappointment that bound his every failed previous relationship would attach themselves to something inherently _right,_ and therefore less deserving of all the trouble.

As bad as he felt dragging himself and Barba through all the emotional turmoil, Carisi could not help but recognize that with the cost came a prize--the return of his steely resolve, fortifying itself in every chamber of his heart. 

He couldn’t lose a lover who would never give him up.

Carisi suddenly had the impulse to break the tension surrounding his own private thoughts, and what found him first was a prime example of why he would never be swayed away.

“Hey, you know who was interested in me? And, like, really not subtle about it? Dr. Rudnick.”

Barba made a sound so as to suggest he was affronted on both their behalfs. Then, he had the good grace to come across as unimpressed when he said, “A murderer and a petty criminal? That’s your audience?”

In the grand, winding schemes of Carl Rudnick, people liked to forget the shoplifted coffee nips and arresting officers who let an alleged serial killer continue on through Syracuse. Barba, who was still sore about losing the bid for remand, was not one of those people. 

Pettily, Barba continued, “A man who, successful escapes aside, did not do himself any favors with those mid-half-length caftans, either.” 

“You didn’t pick the good doctor up at a bus station at two in the morning. He looked pretty fresh in his sundress, cardigan get-up.”

“Your know he’s had his license revoked, right?”

“Pumps, too.” 

“My word,” Barba said, the coming taunt spreading itself thick on his tongue like a melting dollop of cream. “Just what breed of homosexual are you, Dominick Carisi, Jr?”

“I’m just saying,” Carisi laughed, but the blush spreading across his face told a whole different story. “Dude’s face is on the cover of every newspaper in America for a week, and he’s got eyes for only me.”

“Oh, so it’s notoriety you want.”

Carisi didn’t respond right away. 

“No, just you.” 

Carisi said this was an exceptionally tender stroke of Barba’s hair, fingers just grazing his temple, and curling to a stop under his ear. It was so gentle a move that Barba nearly rocked himself off the couch turning to give an adequate response. 

“ _Fine,_ I’ll suck your cock--” 

Carisi’s absurd string of giggles soon found itself overpowered by his cell phone’s trilling. 

“Hey, Amanda--” Carisi stopped, listened. The hand in Barba’s hair moved to support his craning head. “Yeah, I’m here.” 

Then he was quiet, and Barba watched from his idling vantage point as all the joy drained from Carisi’s features. The softness did not leave, but filled instead with sorrow’s great weight. Barba rearranged himself slightly, and drew his long arms around Carisi’s narrow waist, a great oak growing around a sapling. 

“Text it to me?” Carisi put his free hand over Barba’s, who had now taken to zipping and unzipping Carisi’s fly. His headache may have subsided, but Carisi knew the man had a healthy sum of scotch in his system. That he was a patient, gradual drunk made for many wily evenings in the past.

“I’ll be right there. Probably beat the unies.” 

Carisi ended the call, then pressed a kiss to the top of Barba’s head, saying, as if Barba hadn’t been in proximity to hear the entire exchange, “I gotta go. Caught a case nearby.” 

Barba sat up and let Carisi go; it wouldn’t do to be as he wanted--a languishing, unmoving form situated so perfectly in the younger man’s care. There was, quite literally, a world beyond his apartment, and from it came a call to action, asked and answered. 

“Stay inside, lock the doors, bar the windows?” 

Carisi moved to reorient himself, with Barba following aimlessly and at a distance. He watched the transformation: even if the wrinkled slacks remained a constant, Carisi’s whole demeanor changed. He was no longer the sweet, scared man who could scarcely contend with where his life had taken him, into whose arms he found himself wrapped and secured. 

The glock at his hip would impede such an embrace, now. 

Winter coat on, badge secured to a front pocket, coat hiding all other distinctive markers--save for his face which read _cop_ in the upper lip alone, mustache or no--Carisi held up a moment. He crossed the kitchen in three long steps and found Barba in his path, still completely undone in every way Carisi had made him. He hadn’t even bothered to tug his slacks back on, and his bare legs, hugged with dark hair, made Carisi think to check the fly to his own trousers. 

Open, still. Barba would have let him leave the building like that, too. Carisi was sure of it. Hell, Barba might even wait by the window in the hopes that, from four stories up, he’d hear Carisi’s shrill yelp when the winter air met the thin spread of his briefs.

Carisi ducked in for a parting kiss--something Barba, despite feeling put-out, was party to without question.

The gesture was instinctive, now, and Barba didn’t want to think if he ever had to stop, could he?

He stared the door after Carisi had gone, very nearly forgetting to lock it. When he did, and leaned against the door for that extra bit of assurance, he found himself in a perfect position to survey his empty apartment. It was as it had been when he stalked around it, angry, drinking, _thinking,_ before Carisi swept in, soft and careful, opening his heart for its requisite beating. Barba saw his own empty existence like bookends around the substance Carisi brought in.

And it wouldn’t change, ever, Barba knew, unless he let Carisi in completely. So long as he kept secrets, forged paths around the truth and set Carisi loose, he’d always find himself lacking. 

Barba was angry for the realization--angrier than he would have been, had his day not been leading to exclusively this: another thoughtless failure of his own making. 

He hadn’t told Carisi the whole truth, of course. Nor did he plan to. 

Sipping his scotch, Barba wandered his apartment, playing the scene over in his mind, reliving the humiliating afternoon. He might have spoken more about it to start, and laid off his lover, but Carisi was such a hard target, and Barba wanted to throw himself against something and really feel the impact. 

Barba wondered how it would have felt to throw his recent incident against Carisi. What would Carisi have said of Barba’s own response, had Barba deigned to share more than but a handful of details? 

Barba supposed he hadn’t shared because he didn’t want to know, and could not stand to confirm his own fears that Carisi would be embarrassed for him, even a little ashamed. And Barba couldn’t blame him: accepting insults and favors for the same cause was hardly noble. 

Barba, in his infinite capacity to find still more means of fault, decided that was his greatest error. He’d told himself there was a duty to uphold, but only laughter was flung in his face as a result, and slights plucked as easily as from a deck of cards, readily stacked, waiting to be doled out. 

His anger--despite being ample, ready, and eager to show itself--was strangely nameless, a thing without a country to call its own. He couldn’t place its origins, and leaned back and forth between options.

_Simple spite?_

Barba had once berated a man into a heart attack, a ‘Spanish Dandy’ comment holed away in the back of his mind, and often fought for added prison time over less than that. But his means for waging war over an insult slimmed considerably when facing off with a Judge.

He took his slights personally, but preferred to handle them professionally. Not the best system, but Barba prided himself on being able to find satisfaction in his work. 

Or was he in _mourning?_

There was something to be said for the nod given to Carisi in Judge Bertuccio’s comments. His loss of anonymity in a world he had not even entered yet--on his own terms, even--hit Barba especially hard. He’d gone places with his background, name, and home address all shouting ahead of him down hallowed halls. Carisi hadn’t even turned the corner yet towards law, and there was Barba’s reputation, setting a strange new precedent. 

Barba scolded himself; he was no saint. He was concerned for his own pride and his inability to have his way with the response--a thing he always strived to make sharper, colder, and more cruel than what was said to him. 

So what was he really, then, if not embarrassed? 

And terrified, in turn, that that should even be a possibility for him anymore? 

Barba knew it was a recent development. 

He’d always been a flirt, and recognition of that fact--indeed, reciprocation--never upset him. He’d taken abuse in his youth for an unapologetic life, and those lessons carried him well into adulthood, outfitting him with a thick skin. It was only on the back of an attempt on his life that attention had itself come to feel like a threat, and if not to his very existence, then surely to its trappings. 

Somehow--and given the evidence, maybe he was wrong--Barba had always lived free from the thought that his father might hate him enough to kill him. _He doesn't hate me enough to **bother**_ was what he once said to Alex, when the other boy saw through Barba’s broken arm and blackened eye in the sixth grade, the unsettled look on his face telling Barba he could only imagine what was next would be what was final. 

Since then, Barba had met people who could be bothered. They’d followed him home and sought to deliver on promises his father had only bandied about, his works slickened with derision and alcohol. 

Barba loathed both his initial fear and this runny, messy afterbirth. It spread like swamp water, and seeped into the parts of his life he’d thought were on solid ground. Therapy had meant to help him manage the resulting stress, but Barba worried for desensitizing himself to past events, more aware now than ever as to the ways others could bring terror to his doorstep. And had he been more mindful at the time, perhaps he’d have saved himself the trouble.

There were still dreams, vision-driven states of panic, and intrusive thoughts that plagued Barba’s mind--things he hid well enough from Carisi, whose boldfaced desire to protect him was yet one more failure Barba couldn’t bring himself to lay at the man’s feet. So he crafted a more lifelike mask and wore it sparingly, but with wholehearted dedication. It was a solitary kindness, unique in Barba’s constant care, because he certainly had no hang-ups about throwing the odd emotional punch over lesser matters.

_Not lesser._

Just those closest to Carisi’s heart, and coincidentally--cosmically, wrongfully--farthest from Barba’s own.

He showered and dressed for bed, ignoring his phone as it chirped with the arrival of a text. 

_[Two perps, probably still in the area. Gonna be a long night. Talk later?]_

And because Carisi wasn’t there to see him, Barba fixed himself another drink. 

-

In bed, alone, Barba tried to enjoy the silence, given its rarity in his life, now. He splayed himself out in bed, burying his face in the bright, fresh scent of departed bodies. He stretched, reaching into far more space than he’d known for some time. He’d have guessed the other side of the bed was commandeered by an occupying force for as little as he ventured there alone. 

Desite Barba’s best efforts to feel lavish, it felt less like triumph over stolen land than assumed loneliness. 

Barba thought this was how his life had been, and would be again, if any of his arguments stuck. Maybe Carisi wouldn’t _leave_ \--he’d given too much of himself already--but he could surely make himself scarce. There was plenty of bed still to retreat to.

An extra shift here or there. A faked phone call. 

The idea was enough to rouse Barba to brush his teeth again, because it felt like the most expedient response to the sour taste in his mouth. He crawled back into bed, preoccupied by the fact that where the mint hit his scotch-soaked tongue, it tasted strangely of gunpowder. He got a whiff of it sometimes, on his fingers. 

Barba laid in bed for a full minute before closing his eyes, forgetting briefly that no one was about to join him there. 

He kept perched on the narrowest edge of sleep for some time, passing the point of frustration within the first half hour. It was as though an unseen force was crouched over him, spindly legs bent on either side, extended torso arcing over him, fingers drawing like needles towards his eyes, disturbing him lash by lash until he blinked awake for just a few seconds, then settled, and succumbed to the game all over again. 

When a text arrived, lighting up the dark and quiet of his bedroom, Barba instinctively reached for it, but couldn’t be sure he hadn’t finally begun to sleep and dream. 

The contents of the text did not lend themselves generously to sense. 

Carisi had sent him a picture of the night outside, a street empty if only for the police vehicles coardaning off the block, each of them throwing short streams of red and blue lights, though they were shunted and distorted some by distance and new snowfall. It was a dreamy, eerie photo, desolate and stark for its lack of figures to fill it up. It was some color of pretty, despite the inherent danger. 

Carisi’s love affair with photography was first and foremost a thing he used to focus on his loved ones--family, friends, and colleagues, despite their protestations--because Carisi only ever wanted to be closer to people, and capturing some side of them for the camera gave him that victory. Barba didn’t begrudge him his came-with-the-frame-family tendencies. Carisi very much liked those faces, almost as if they held genuine lives. 

That was his aesthetic: happy, lovely, composed. 

But he wasn’t above straying, even with just this: a grainy iPhone shot chasing light and patches of snow down an empty city block. That alone was a sight, but it was far more fantastic to see what Carisi himself saw worthwhile about the scene. With the light and dark and white, white snow, itself in such a natural--if deeply uncommon--state in their City, Barba imagined Carisi was on the lookout for new beginnings. 

_[I like it]_ Barba wrote honestly, and then, _[But no crime scene selfies, please.]_

Carisi’s reply was swift and teasing: _[don’t hinder my artistic vision]_

_[You know me. I’m a regular Pope Paul IV.]_

There was no response for a while, and Barba was tempted to turn away from his phone and towards whatever vague promise of sleep was still availed to him when Carisi wrote back.

Gone was the mirthful flirting; Barba was met instead with a sincerity that made his breath catch in his throat. 

Carisi had always had that effect on him. Anyone doing that would, but none before Carisi had attempted to stage a coup on Barba’s composure.

 _[I’m sorry ur day was shitty]_ he wrote, and _[it will be okay. Even the stuff u didnt tell me about]_

 _Fuck,_ Barba thought, feeling a tendril of warmth unfurl in his stomach. _That’s sweet._

He felt a breath by his ear, as if whatever force had been keeping him awake had done so for exactly this purpose, and watched now, eagerly, for its plans to come to fruition. 

Barba wriggled up in bed some, turning on the bedside lamp before straightening his broad shoulders. Before he could reason himself out of the decision, he succumbed to the tedious, absurd act Carisi was always asking of him to partake. 

_It’s fun,_ he’d said.

 _Everybody does it,_ he’d said. 

_Please? For me?_

Dressing like he did presupposed that he’d be seen by others, and he was no stranger to vanity, besides. He liked how he looked in a suit, and knew when that opinion was shared. 

He’d be lying--in his creeping age and softening body--if the clothes did not carry much of the water towards that end. 

Barba arranged himself for nothing so risque, only a slight smile and flash of chest hair. He propped himself up on the pillow, arm thrown back behind his head to feign a kind of longing. He took only one picture, and, deciding that was silliness enough, did not look to judge his own work until after the deed was done and the picture sent. 

It wasn’t so bad, he supposed. It was fairly well composed and the light was warm, orange on his right bleeding into the blue to his left. His smile was a bit cheekier than he’d planned, his hair less orderly than he liked. 

Carisi seemed to take the oversights in stride. 

_[what a s t u d ]_  
_[i’m so blessed]_

Barba grinned as he replied, _[You’re so full of shit.]_ and _[Go get the son of a bitch.]_

 _[in a minute]_ Carisi wrote, and subsequently added an eggplant, eggplant, and water gun. 

Barba balked; this was the man he lying awake for in bed for, mooning after like a schoolboy?

He set his phone back on the nightstand, killed the light and stared up at his ceiling until the spots cleared and he saw only darkness. The room felt cooler for the rush of excitement he’d encountered in even such a pointless task. His idling hand moved to rest on his thigh, to test the sensitive flesh, but the warmth of his own skin did not entice him. Barba was content to wait, and feel the full force of Carisi’s response to his gesture--maybe in an hour, maybe when the sun was up, and even if exhausted to the point of falling over, Carisi would be sure to stick his landing. 

Until then he’d sleep, Barba decided, like the dead. 

-

Barba awoke in bright and unflinching sunlight, having missed two late night texts-- _[will do]_ and _[love you]_ \--as well as an early morning photo attachment depicting a weak New York sunrise. The first streaks of daylight colored what smudges of sky Carisi could capture between the buildings crowding the frame. Though the composition was fine, the colors soft and pleasant, it was not as lovely at the late-night shot--a determination made by the fact that Carisi was still chasing an end.

The photo, of course, meant he hadn’t caught it, yet. Barba didn’t respond to that or any of the texts he’d missed, believing Carisi’s said it all: _I’m still out here, freezing my ass off, having probably been five minutes too late six hours ago._

Barba hoped he got one. For the sake of the victim and the security of these few City blocks, certainly, but also because a taste of success could awaken the spirit after a sleepless night, and while there were a great many things Barba concerned himself with on Carisi’s behalf, the man’s spirit always centered itself in his purview. 

That thought held with him as he shaved and made coffee, then puttered around the apartment half-dressed for as long as he could. The quiet that had befallen the space wasn’t so unfamiliar to Barba, even without his and Carisi’s weeklong tour de force of a spat. 

He felt cold for starting his day in silence, both in the sense that there wasn’t a handsome man to talk and plan his day with, or to pull him off the path he tracked like clockwork around his apartment. A single instance of this hadn’t been enough to make him ache and grow especially fond for Carisi’s incessant interruption, but then, this wasn’t the first, and growing used to something did nothing to soothe Barba’s distaste for it. Barba missed the distinct pleasure of having eyes, hands, and the occasional mouth on him any given morning.

Barba decided Carisi had nothing to fear as to him being alone and deciding he prefered it. As he spied the excess coffee left in the pot, Barba knew that ship has sailed.

But then there was a moment when he’s dressed, leaning against his kitchen counter, drinking coffee and scrolling through his secret Twitter feed that Barba felt the slow bead of realization pearl at the back of his throat and then drop to his core. _This_ was _his_ first love: a life of his own making. 

Because Barba liked occupying a space solely with his own body and thoughts, and ceding nothing in terms of preference. He liked who he was alone--stately, reserved--and worried sometimes that Carisi saw too much of that. Being alone reminded him of who he was as a student at Harvard, when he first came to appreciate his own merit. There, he’d been a quiet, studious figure, mindful not to draw undue attention. His own professors scarcely took note of him--scholarly or otherwise--until he got comfortable and opened his mouth, becoming some vision of the boy he’d been growing up, a smartass rife with opinions. 

So he liked the return to calm, preferring it in some ways that he could be left to explore his thoughts and craft his arguments in peace. It used to terrify him, the prospect of people knowing the extent or work he put in, that he wasn’t a total natural. 

Carisi wasn’t like that. The prospect of learning, trying, and sometimes failing in an open forum delighted him. Barba was quietly jealous of Carisi’s disregard for his own ego; it made him a better student and, of all things, a more genuine lover. 

Barba wasn’t that, couldn’t be. Being pigeonholed all his young life meant he would never again name himself subservient to anyone or anything, be it lover or cause, no matter the depths of adoration sinking his side of the equation. 

Barba’s preoccupation with his and Carisi’s disjointed bodies of work--everything from Carisi’s tender smile to Barba’s own, which oftentimes felt cracked over a curb--helped to draw his attention away from his own problems and their mounting immediacy. But no sooner had he put his second coffee of the day on his desk and slipped out of his coat and scarf was he given word from Carmen that the jury on the Gonzalez case had reached a verdict. 

A fast turnaround, Barba hoped, would limit his exposure.

Carmen gave him a curious look when he did not seem pleased for the development.

“Your closing arguments went well,” she said, tending her words like perennial vines, letting each climb and wait, as if in hesitant question. Barba gave a noncommittal hum in response, and they both knew his assistant of nine years wouldn’t let him get away with only that. 

“Marta Gonzalez actually sent you flowers,” Carmen added, speaking of Carla’s grandmother. “They’re on my desk--I figured you wouldn’t mind.”

Barba gave a small, genuine smile. He didn’t. 

“Let’s hope she wasn’t premature.”

-

Barba felt good.

The jury was unequivocally on Carla’s side, on _his_ side. He saw it in their straightened shoulders and tidy appearances. There were no late nights, no tossing and turning spurred on by uneven consciences--only a general consensus more-or-less arrived at the night before, and agreed upon that morning. All their eyes seemed collectively drawn to Judge Bertuccio, as if they were actors in their first school play, all awaiting the cue to hit their one, practiced line.

 _We find the defendant…_

Barba wouldn’t name it, not yet. It was the one superstitious act he allowed himself in court; everything else he relied on came from experience. 

And it was experience that told him not to press his luck. Barba did not seek out the juror who had gamely done as much to him, nor did he silently confer with Calhoun, who was stationed in the lead seat opposite him. The aisle that separated them never felt so narrow. 

Barba trained his sights on Bertuccio, clocking at once how his face and hands were still red from the cold, and how pressed he seemed that the indignities of the weather should affect _him,_ a judge. Barba decided it on the spot: it was better to keep up with Bertuccio than feign interest in the papers on his table, better to show his face than concede he felt any modicum of the shame Bertuccio believed he was due. 

Training his eye, keeping his focus, perhaps playing a stronger game than Barba had cards enough in his hand-- _that_ was how Barba noticed when Bertuccio attentions wavered, strayed, and stuck elsewhere in the room. 

The man’s brows dropped, melting into the squint of his eyes. 

The line of intrigue shrank shorter, shorter, and shorter still, arriving at Barba’s left. 

Instinct turned Barba’s head; experience prompted him to stand.

“Barba.”

There was blood on Sergeant Tutuola’s coat. 

Barba, ascending from his seat, saw it before the tight expression taking root on Fin’s face. He instinctively closed in; blood, _wounds_ \--were private. Barba hated wearing his for as long as he could remember. Every bruise, every tender limb, the _pin in his jaw_ that left him swollen and soft spoken for weeks after his father delivered his parting blow. They were hideous afflictions.

It was his compulsion now that they should be hidden. 

Suddenly Barba couldn’t look away. Blood, and bits of gravel. He looked hard at Fin, a desire for clarity eclipsing his want of secrecy in these matters. 

The wounded didn’t pin the evidence to their shirt fronts if they could help it. 

Barba’s mouth went dry, a consequence of his slackened jaw.

The blood wasn’t Fin’s to hide. 

Fin said, “He’s going to be okay.” 

“Who,” Barba said--a seemingly stupid question, if not for the hope it held that Fin would answer differently than Barba feared, than _he knew,_ deep in the hollowed-out pit of his stomach.

“He’s in surgery now. He was still conscious last I saw him.” 

A non-answer. Barba had heard millions from the very spot he was stood in, but this was the most egregious. 

“Is that some kind of joke, Detective? Did you last see him before he got--shot?” 

Barba felt sick, having made the leap himself and not being corrected for it. And maybe he looked it, because one of Fin’s hands flew to his upper arm, the other halting in front of him, as if to steady a waning man--a case of mistaken identity, surely, when Barba was nothing but incensed. 

“...I’m gonna take you to the hospital, alright Counselor?”

Barba did not respond outright, but his chest was heaving, servicing great, silent breaths through his nose. 

He did not know if some involuntary answer accompanied his automated response. Barba sat, because there was a gallery of people staring at him, a jury besides, and a judge at his back throwing limp iterations of his name, letting them rise once before plummeting to the earth. 

He sat for all of sixty seconds, his mind going blank as Judge Bertuccio resumed speaking. He tried to make sense of the situation--what little he knew of it--and for all his empty-handed ventures, Barba eventually struck upon the single notion that had kept him for a minute, but wouldn’t any longer: that Carisi’s status would not change with or without him. 

That it was his only solid conclusion did imbue it with virtue; rather, it was bereft of all purpose. Inaction for uncertainty’s sake wasn’t criminal, wasn’t a sin, and yet Barba could not conjure up a more heinous thing he could be doing than nothing at all.

He wasn’t some _lost soul._ He knew his choices had merit, as sure as his actions had consequences. 

Barba stood so fast his vision blurred and his world tipped sideways, even though he kept upright with his feet planted squarely on the ground. 

Becoming an interruption of the perfunctory proceedings for a second time in as many minutes, Barba he began gathering his files and stuffing them into his briefcase. He did this with trembling hands and great determination--a coupling that did not lend itself to success.

“Your honor,” he started. Speaking out of turn wasn't a rarity for him, but being the only voice rising to surpass that of a judge was always nerve-wracking. At least, that's what Barba told himself was the cause of his splintering speech at the height of _honor._

“I apologize for the interruption but I have to go.”

 _“Go,_ Mr. Barba?” Bertuccio sounded almost intrigued by the intrusion. His reputation--and Barba’s own firsthand account--told him the senior judge was of a mind to only let an distraction run far enough to make striking it down all the more satisfying.

Barba didn’t only have to outrun, he had to evade.

“Yes. Due to a--a personal matter.”

Spencer Reevely, who was sat between the defendant and his more competent defense, was ignorant but not entirely blind to the look of a lost jury. He stood from his stead beside Calhoun, and seized the unsteady moment.

“Your honor, this is hugely disrespectful to your court, and besides that an overt, overwrought, _delaying_ tactic--” 

“Delaying what, a guilty verdict?” Barba snapped, then tried again for understanding from Bertuccio--a miracle, if he could swing it. _“Your honor, **please.** ”_

Even as the words passed his lips, tone climbing towards shrill as Barba contemplated being refused, he realized there was no world in which he could get what he needed without asking, and no world in which he could forgive himself should he fail to act, regardless of the answer. 

He hastily dug for his phone, and began to bullshit himself a way out. 

“The DA will, of course, provide alternative representation for the remainder of proceedings--” 

The way his hands were shaking as he attempted to text Carmen to make good on his offer to the court, Barba knew he’d have better look sticking his head out into the hallway in search of the first fresh face he could recall from the recent holiday party. 

Between his nerves and autocorrect butchering his message, Barba was at his wits end when Rose Callier entered, a vision in a houndstooth pencil skirt, sent by Carmen after Fin first called the office to find Barba. She placed herself at Barba’s side, announced in short order that she would be handling the remainder of the case on the DA’s behalf, as calm and assured as if picking up from Barba inches from the finish line was always the plan. 

All this seemed to happen in a matter of seconds, but in the interim, Barba’s hands refused to comply with the intent he imbued them with; his papers wrinkled and resisted as he willed them into his briefcase, and still their found its outermost parts. In his frustration, Barba did not hear Calhoun stand, much less cross that channel between their sides.

She enveloped one of his wrists with her hand, guiding him away. From his briefcase, she handed Barba his wallet, and kept the rest with the wordless promise she would return his things to Carmen. 

Calhoun did not speak; she did not know the words to answer for the fear that gripped her friend by the throat to the point that all other functions were choked off and seized. She touched him like she had in the cab they shared the evening before, and wondered what she’d said then that she’d felt so confident in. An insult seemed most likely.

But she couldn’t even bite one of those off. 

There was something else demanded of her, here, something like goodness, but existing outside that state in which she could parse out a helping. She needed to radiate it, produce it herself from her own hands and lungs. Barba required some form of immediate compensation for this latest blow. 

Calhoun didn’t have harmony of the spirit to both feel pain and speak to its resolution. Her heart wasn’t so malleable, and the words--

_The words._

Barba himself had once known them. 

Calhoun hoped he’d tell them to her over drinks, in some gaudy way people did when they brushed death’s side, but refused its hand. 

Phone in hand and wallet stuffed in his jacket pocket--Barba supposed Calhoun was right; he might need ID--he turned, because the aisle was clear and his path was set. 

Except nothing necessary was ever as easy, and all things required of the heart were not particularly cleared through the soul.

Barba caught the eye of the Gonzalez family, all of whom were stationed--like they had been for weeks now--like stone fixtures in the gallery. To the father and mother he’d spent hours reassuring, consoling, and educating, to the abuela who’d sent him flowers, to the brothers and sisters and cousins who turned up as an army to rival that of any school board and its list of wealthy donors, to the little girl with a spine of burnished steel, Barba had no explanation.

_Something terrible happened._

_I know you can relate._

“I’m sorry,” he said, and knew at once the apology wasn’t enough. Their trauma wasn’t over--it may never be--but they were owed someone by their side, regardless of the verdict. Barba’s every intention to _be_ that someone was gone at the very notion of Carisi, in a state less than whole. 

In a state that would leave a part of him on Detective Tutuola’s jacket. 

Fin was stood waiting at the back of the courtroom, holding the door ajar. He hadn't secured a seat, much less left on his own accord; there was no expectation that Barba would actually make him wait.

Barba wasn’t about to forgive himself for the minute he _had_ squandered and, thinking Fin had every right to dogpile on his moral failing, Barba passed through the door with whispered plea.

“I wasn’t thinking--”

“I get it.”

In the part of his brain that could still register petty grievances, Barba thought Fin was being short with him, but the minutia of pleasantries given or denied only held his attention for so long, because Barba could just as well answer for his colleague’s attitude, himself.

Fin had every intention of being in his fellow detective’s corner. He didn’t have time for whatever convoluted issues of pride, appearances, or some such ripe bullshit that gave Barba so much as a moment’s pause, and in turn denied Fin his rightful place. 

The man was a Sergeant, and Carisi’s friend, besides, but Barba and the waking world seemed to have a higher agreement, that Barba be indulgent with his pain, even when finding it in places adjacent to the motherload. Barba battled the twin opponents of _wanting to apologize_ and _hoping he could get away without doing so,_ and what won out was repetitive beats of silence--starting now, ending on his deathbed--in the hopes that Fin never brought up his failure to act. 

Barba had made silence a contest, and for him even the briefest moment of endurance was his own victory. 

“You got a coat, man?”

It was twenty degrees out, not factoring in the windchill-- _of course_ Barba had a coat. Only, he couldn’t remember where it was. _In the cloak room,_ he knew, but as to where _that_ had gone, Barba was clueless. And it was already so close: the grand set of doors leading to the fractured mouth of the courthouse, opened wide on grand columns, steps tonguing out to the street. 

“No,” he said with more confidence than he had, let alone needed. Barba very nearly added that he didn’t appreciate the _tone, Detective,_ noting that Fin was speaking softly, his words reaching towards caring. Barba willed his stride to do better, and he pushed open the courthouse doors steps ahead of Fin, breaking first into the frigid mid-morning. 

It wasn’t the cold that brought the stinging sensation of tears to his eyes, or seized and petrified his lungs into a state of unbeing. And it wasn’t the abundance of still-snow-white rooftops or slicks of sidewalk that blinded him.

What struck Barba like a cadillac, forcibly knocking his every sense out of commission, was the fact that Carisi’s life _not being as it had been_ existed outside the courtroom. That Fin’s interruption would genuinely see him out the door called the reasons he used into question, now, and Barba was hesitant to answer. 

Was Carisi ruined? Could he recover? Between lying unconscious in the street or under the knife, was it choice or chance that mattered?

Did Barba hate the deed or fear the outcome? Was there any use making sense of which had kept him in his seat?

Would Barba waste a moment of time with Carisi, if he got it, trying to explain?

The ratio between questions he had and answers he’d accept left Barba feeling lightheaded. Still, he took the steps instinctively, his brain hardly registering the speed and jostling of his heart. The idea that he might slip and fall, and perhaps get to Carisi’s side any faster from the back of a speeding ambulance, teased his darker impulses. Barba had to stop and grip with his bare hand an icy bit of railing, joining it quick with his other hand. The railing cut through the center of the steps as intermittent vertebrae, and he held fast, as if the earth had begun to accelerate in its spin. 

_Not before him,_ Barba thought wildly as his vision blurred, blasted white, and finally began to settle. _Not one second._

Fin reappeared, his grip back on Barba’s arm. He’d somehow found more to say--placating words he would have said in the first place, were there any truth to them--but Barba couldn’t hear, much less think to respond. He bit his tongue so as not to unleash what was screaming through every cell of his body, what he wished more than anything to refute in good standing, though his breaking heart knew better.

The grey skies overhead began to open, ceding territory to the sun’s glare. The cold chased fast on the heels of the light, and Barba felt both sear his neck as he stood, rooted to the spot by fear of what have driven him out into the cold, and the untold terror of what, precisely, he was running towards. He blinked open his eyes and saw where Fin had left his car untended on the side of the road. Barba didn’t need it spoon-fed to him--the placement of the front wheels and a security officer standing awkwardly to one side told him Fin had all but hopped the curb, flashed his badge, and unceremoniously told the nearest uniformed bystander to _watch my fucking car._

Beyond that, Barba saw an intersection. He’d see several dozen more, unless Fin took the FDR.

That much, at least, wasn’t unknown. He could save the panic attack fermenting between the panicked beats of his heart for the traffic coming off Exit 12, if necessary. 

Comprehension, Barba told himself, was the best he could hope for. Trust where he was going, first, even if every fibre of his being cried out to deny the purpose. 

He wrenched open his hands, shocked though they were with cold, and followed at Fin’s insistence. Air swept in and out of his petrified lungs. His legs moved. His feet touched the ground. His grip found car doors and seatbelts. His voice remained absent, trapped in his throat or perhaps abandoned to the high courtroom ceilings. 

All the while, Barba kept his head bowed and stricken face hidden, lest anyone somehow recognize his singular determination to do what Carisi had asked of him. 

To see, at least, what was to be seen.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys. _You guys._
> 
> Thank you so much for your comments and continued support. I hope this next installment is enjoyable. :)

A gleaming winter’s light found them as they drove under the shadow of buildings, even for being sat behind ionized car windows. Barba narrowed his eyes and ducked his head against the glare, but felt his eyes prickle and sting all the same. 

Barba wasn’t sure his ass had so much as hit the seat before they were peeling out, pulling a hard U-turn, and delving into that thrum of mid-morning traffic. Only then did time seem to slow to a crawl, and despite the city streets passing his view in one great blur, he felt as though both he and Fin were holding their ground. 

Just missing crossing into another city block because of an idling sedan weary of the kinetic nature of the crosswalk undid all of Barba’s stoicism. 

“What…” Barba swallowed, his throat still raw from the cold. He grabbed at the thoughts spinning in his head, only commanding them into order after the fact. “Just… what can you tell me. And, everything. Tell me--everything.” 

Neither he nor Fin looked at one another. 

It went against Barba’s every instinct, but that was what he feared: seeing far more on Fin’s face than he was ready to know. 

“After almost nine hours of waitin’ we got movement in the apartment complex. Suspect tried to make a break for it. Carisi was in pursuit.” Stopped at a light, Fin hesitated to continue. He seemed to think Barba might better take the news if they were still moving towards their rightful end, not stalled behind a chartreuse prius. “He was shot once in the side. Once in the upper thigh. Caught another through the arm. I think he’d raised it, turned--it about ran through.”

Even for asking, a description of Carisi’s injuries wasn’t what Barba expected to hear. Fin wasn’t frantic in his telling, didn’t impress valued terms on what seemed _good_ or _bad,_ possibly because it was all worse than Barba could imagine. 

“How did it look?”

The question passed his lips with a numbness Barba wasn’t familiar with. It salted and burned over his tongue, and Barba wondered if never again uttering a single syllable wouldn’t be preferable to having to ask such a question, twisted as it was ghastly. 

They both understood the merits of the question, and how it was a cover what Barba wanted to know. 

Fin refused to answer. 

“He’s in surgery now--”

Barba grew frantic, and for feeling untethered from sense, grew angry. 

_“How did it look, Detective?”_

“Listen, Barba--”

“If you want to drive me any further from the point, Detective, you might want to _turn the car around.”_

The sharpness of his words didn’t mask the fact that his voice was breaking around them, that Barba himself was fast coming apart. 

“Bad,” Fin said. Despite Barba’s demands, the honestly arrived raw and bitter, even on his own tongue. “But not as bad as it could have been. For three shots? Not as bad as it could have been.” 

Lips pursed, Fin worked his mouth around the story, making sure it fit around the parts he knew well enough to tell. 

“We got to him quick--Amanda and me. I was just around the corner and down the block, and she’d doubled back, staked out a side alleyway. Think small-t shape, Carisi at the intersection. We weren't that far from each other, but not close enough either.” 

Barba couldn’t picture the scene, so he tried instead to understand what Fin was saying in the context of why it should matter. They were within a block of one another. They’d heard the shots and had likely seen the scene itself, moments after the consequences were laid. 

“So he wasn’t lying there--bleeding out--for long. Is what you’re saying. You all got there and he continued--bleeding out--in your company.”

The words seethed out of him, expelled like a noxious gas. Barba knew he was being needlessly cruel; Fin knew it, too, and did not lose himself down a tangent of pain that might have satisfied him.

“Yeah. We got to him quick.”

Barba was silent for a time. The next question was inevitable, yet he bit into his tongue for as long as possible, tasting the warmth and tang of blood as he did. Somehow, he didn't think it tasted like his own.

“And the shooter?”

Barba asked this as if he thought one death should presuppose another, but Fin denied him that.

“Surrendered his weapon,” he said, as if that should finish Barba’s thought. 

But Barba was immediately thrown by its measure. Rather than a triumphant, _we have the motherfucker in custody,_ colored with any number of questionable police tactics as to how he was taken in, there came a way of speaking from Fin that put the shooter on even ground. 

A man who had autonomy, even for stealing Carisi’s. A man who had an inherent choice, and in doing the only feasible thing, somehow came away accredited for doing the _right_ thing. 

“He’s a cop,” Barba realized, and his heart sank further still. It was swimming now, in a stomach bile made of his morning coffee and every swallowed prayer that followed each wrenching detail. “Jesus. A cop.”

Terror gripped Barba by the shirtfront and besieged his senses. He wiped at his face--an errant hand, first, but it held, gripping over his whole mouth and reaching for his eyes. There were no tears, just the sickening feeling that he’d well and truly lost this round, lost _everything._

Because, _finally,_ every threat to ruin his career and terminate his life as he knew it had caught up with him, and levied its deadliest consequences. 

_Oh._

Barba heard retribution’s silky taunt like those of a terrorizing spirit, the kind the Caribbean mothers from his old neighborhood used to warn about coming over from the islands. 

_You thought I’d come for only you?_

His hand fell away into his lap, where it laid unmet by its twin, as both were preoccupied with unanswerable dread. It filled both, then spilled over onto his lap, then began to drain and pool at his feet. They’d have to crack a window by the time they hit 57th, or risk drowning in it.

Barba didn’t know how long he was silent. Long enough for his mouth to run dry and his eyes to sting for the unwavering, absent-minded focus he’d given to the car’s dashboard. Long enough, too, for his breathing to drag itself back into working order.

He sounded both inexplicably rushed and winded when he asked, his voice painfully weak despite the fervent anger he felt, “So if he--dies--what then? Someone gets put on paid administrative leave?”

At once, Barba hated that he’d said it. 

He’d stayed in his seat in court for a minute after the fact just to will that possibility away, as if the worst couldn’t happen if he refused to entertain it. 

“He’s not gonna die.” 

Fin’s denial came faster than any of the facts to which he was most percipient. Barba looked at him, almost casually, except for the grim twist of his mouth that spoke to his unrendered devastation. There were no tears, no screaming--though the few words he did manage certainly cut through his throat like one--and no real shape to the thing Barba felt was about to crush him. There was only the creeping shadow of its power, inching up behind him, and stretching out endlessly towards the horizon.

“You don't know that.” 

That fact--the reality it wielded with all the grace of a sledgehammer--sank deeper and set itself like a cancer in the marrow of Barba’s bones.

He threw himself neither into a rage or a panic; he was simply quiet, eerily still. Every action he could think to take now lacked consequence, he realized. All the fear and absence of autonomy made him feel like a child, and sitting in the passenger seat while being placated to didn’t help shatter the illusion. 

“He’s strong,” Fin said into the silence, and though there was some force behind the words, Barba heard them for the wayward prayer they were, striking him well ahead of any deity. 

Barba wished himself deaf; he wasn’t any good as a first responder. He was better suited to swoop in afterwards to survey the remains. 

Some days he thought himself less a lawyer than a mortician. 

Fin continued, undeterred: “He is. And resilient. You two got that in common.” 

Barba wanted to hate that Fin--a colleague--could possibly know that about him, or ever be in such a position to make the comparison, but--he was not. He couldn’t be. His spirits were buoyed by the compliment made on Carisi’s behalf, in which Barba shared. 

He reasoned, while he may know Carisi as he existed between the sheets, at home, Fin knew Detective Carisi--his behavior in the field, his grit, his presence in a world well outside Barba’s purview and influence. 

Fin knew how Carisi fared on his own. 

Barba wanted to take heart in that, but his thoughts circled back to the deed, and not just Carisi’s ability to stand up against it. 

Did Fin know Carisi better than he knew the standard-issue piece kept hot on his hip? Did anyone? Was there no more intimate knowledge than the ruin such a weapon could bring? Or did its own heavy presence number the wearer to its danger? Barba felt sick, wanting to ask. 

He realized, of course, he didn’t need to. 

He’d played witness to a Sig Sauer’s impact on the human body--and not just the one whipped hard across his face. 

Judge Elana Barth-- _his friend from school,_ a moniker that prefaced more than enough mentions of gun violence in Barba’s experience--was made a target of by Johnny Drake in her own courtroom, and took a bullet to the shoulder for having the gall to air the pimp’s crimes in open court. Barba remembered how soft and strange her flesh felt for being ripped apart. The muscle and bone were their own problem; Barba had trouble enough tearing open her sheath of black robes at the point of contact, and putting his hands on her to stem the bleeding. 

He remembered the blood feeling unnaturally _hot,_ and maybe that played over his face, because Barth had managed to choke out a little laughter at his expense. She made a comment about him being willing to ruin his suit. 

He’d shot right back that she’d lowered the bar considerably, there. 

Barba remembered how she’d never lost consciousness, and only closed her eyes briefly when he asked quietly ahead of any emergency medical attention if she had her long term partner Jennifer Schwartz listed as her emergency contact, or did he need to make the call?

It didn't come out so overwrought when he said it. 

_“Can I call Jenny, or…”_

_“I’ll call her myself,”_ Barth had said, her adamance giving Barba some context for the heat radiating out in waves. 

At the time, Barba didn’t care if it was bravado or a genuine show of strength. It was only later that he inevitably pinned it for a compromise made on both their parts. 

Why had he asked? Why had she said anything else but _yes_ to the first query, thereby negating any need of the second? 

Barba knew why. There was that niggling fear someone somewhere would see their subtlety for silence, and silence for not belonging. What asshole off the street was getting into the room of an ailing Judge or NYPD officer? 

_Me,_ Barba hoped.

As they drove in a newly established silence, Fin found himself staring at Barba’s reflection in the windshield. His heavy brow was furrowed, leaving the whole of his face in a darkness that seemed _impossible,_ given the glare bouncing up from the dusting of snow on the City’s streets.

But then, grief did strange things to people. It broke hearts, opened wrists, and bent spines to its will--surely a little light was nothing special to lay its powers on.

There was more action in Barba’s jaw, which held tight enough to clench over bone and draw his mouth into a thin line. He wasn't going to cry out or fall apart; he’d hold himself together, physically at first, and hopefully his senses would follow. 

Fin knew those rules. He’d grown up answering to them, too.

But what came to mind was not his own steely acceptance of just how ruinous life could be, how eager it was to break a person down to the hardened souls of their feet. 

Fin thought about his son, Ken, whose relationship had long been cool to the point of icy. Ken, who accepted his father’s absence in his life such that he denied the man’s return for years after the fact.

Ken, and the great, gaping fear he had shown when his partner Alejandro was badly assaulted, how it had carried the young man into the squadron and caused him to throw his arms around his father--not a thing Ken had ever done, even with welcome thaw in their relations--and cry and _beg_ for help.

Fin wondered if Barba felt that same grief, and if he didn't speak because it was trouble enough choking it all down.

_Man-to-man,_ Fin thought. Those were his simplest working terms. He could offer Barba that much: acknowledge his pain, promise justice, and hope he wouldn’t misplace his abilities in meeting either. 

Because Barba wasn’t Ken, and Fin didn’t intrinsically owe him anything, and even if he looked to barely be holding it together, barely was enough. 

Fin couldn’t give him actionable knowledge, couldn’t promise he’d hand over the shooter himself. Still, there were _details,_ things the likes of which were needlessly gruesome, so he’d never think to share with a victim’s family, but to a _prosecutor…_

A prosecutor would want to know Fin’s first impression of the spray of bullets, the uneven distribution, the picture he conjured up even for just seeing the bodies laid out on the earth, blood pounding through their veins and seeping into ice and snow, turning the muddy gravel black and shiny.

Fin could tell him, for instance, that Carisi was stood between the suspect and another man, so it wasn’t mere chance Carisi’s wasn’t hit as badly as they were. 

“The other two,” Fin started to say, and cut eyes at Barba just long enough to see the man straighten his spine, as if he had to orientate his body to listen to such things.

“So this is a mass shooting, now,” Barba grit out, and Fin heard what didn’t need adding: _Silly me, the NYPD doesn’t have those._

“One was our suspect. He’s dead.” In any other instance, Fin might have waited for Barba’s bitter take: _Funny how that keeps happening._ But he was able, as most people were prone, to weigh the lives of those he knew and loved well above that of a stranger, now a suspect.

For once, to the prosecutor’s ear, the first life wrongly lost did not grip his interest. 

“The other,” Fin shook his head. “Our vic said there were two, but I’m thinking this guy was just from the building. Something Carisi said over the radio-- _civilian in pursuit._ I think he was trying to help.”

Barba’s ambivalence began to wane.

“Jesus.”

“They revived him in the ambulance. I don’t know if he’ll make it, though.” And Fin supposed he knew why. “He’s black. Big. Same as the suspect.”

Then, his point: “Carisi was in the middle. This cop was shooting wide, left to right. That’s where we saw a greater concentration of shots. Left. And right.” 

Fin knew what he saw--Carisi’s body, laid out on the ground in wild disorder. His limbs never looked so long as they did then, reaching back in to himself after being flung too wide. It never looked good. But there was much to be said for the expressions on the faces of the responding EMTs, and Fin was encouraged by their haste and focus. That said there was time yet to _do something,_ to changed what looked inevitable, seeing it only by halves: the part of Carisi was was open, bleeding, and the part of him that wheezed and called quietly for help.

Fin had been on him in an instant, hearing that. He’d skid down on his knees, and Rollins was fast behind him, already shouting for a bus. Walkie pressed to her ear with her shoulder so that she could repeat those demands, she’d managed to free her hands to collect Carisi’s leg into snug wraps of her scarf. 

Fin learned a lot in those few moments before the ambulance arrived: the way Carisi’s body felt under his hands, heart pumping blood and feeding it too-fast through every misplaced opening. Fin learned, too, that even after decades of following protocol, of getting in and out of these situations intact, he could still be rocked to his core with shame the moment things took a turn.

Because, in the few seconds spent holding his colleague’s head off the ground, Fin was startled by a hand struggling to gain traction at his side. It was one of the men on either side of Carisi--the suspect or the good samaritan, Fin did not know their distinction, then. He’d seen the look in the man’s roving, panicked eyes, wondering where was the hand to his cheek, the words pressed into him like a prayer that _he,_ too, would be okay? 

Gripping the man’s hand was done on instinct. Keeping his eyes on Carisi was a choice.

Fin had shouted again for help, but knew the odds--like his hopes--were pinned to Carisi. 

Fin wondered if he’d lie to Barba, should the situation turned in such a way that an end would arrive, necessitating that an _ending_ be told. He didn’t doubt he could say the words, thrust the air into them and let them be heard. He thought he knew Barba well enough to guess the man wouldn’t believe him. 

But people surprised him, sometimes, and Fin didn’t know if Barba was desperate enough to try. 

The thought hit him hard as a signed-and-sold regret, and in an instant, Fin lamented that what he might have to say in that instance--that is, what was needed--was something important. 

_He didn’t look scared,_ he’d have to say, when the truth was anything but.

Fin had done it before, and if he career kept its steady ascent, he’d surely do it again.

If he saw the deliberation processing back and forth behind Fin’s eyes, Barba did not question it, did not deny the man his right to be uncertain as to what was best and what was expedient. For his own, Barba recognized in Fin’s turns of haste and indecision the same undercurrent of fear and anger he felt, each piling on the other, neither claiming the load, but only becoming party to it. 

Barba wet his lips.

“This cop have a name?”

Suddenly, everything else Fin might have shared lost its luster. That no EMT sought out Fin’s eye to lower his expectations with a sorry look, flattened by constant use, did not merit a mention. That Carisi’s grip, when it found Fin’s jacket, was like iron could no longer headline this discussion. 

Barba, in an attempt to cope with news made all the more gruesome by its presence on Fin’s clothing, news that was little more than information in its earliest stages, lacking a story, much less a product, had closed himself off from outcomes. He focused instead on the deed. 

“And a badge number,” Fin said, slow, like he had to go to retrieve each word in its own trip, and align them before their presentation. “Both of which are now known to every IAB officer in the City.”

“I’d like to add every DA to that club,” Barba said, his voice thick. “Fin…” he added, a kind of cautionary threat, this one on behalf of himself and the heretofore unknown movements he’d make to will a case into being, even where the entire structure of a city’s law enforcement would only deny him at every turn. 

But Barba didn’t know what he’d do; he only knew how he felt--like he’d sooner raze the city than allow even one building to remain standing, and in it, any individual readied with an excuse dewing on their lips. His threat did not, _could not,_ manifest itself now, not when his fury was overpowered by a pulsing sense of dread. 

He felt it leapfrog his every heartbeat. 

To Fin, Barba seemed to understand what he’d said, without him having to be explicit, to process the details with a little more focus than untenable hope. He was even a touch relieved not to have to pin his hopes on a miracle he didn’t think he’d earned. Instead, there was a set of circumstances to speak to why Carisi hadn’t expired on the cold ground, and why Barba wasn’t a hapless fool to find himself capable of patience. 

And just as that moment of relief surfaced, Barba was flooded, overcome with distress and horror for both Carisi and the breadth of violence that had ripped a hole in his City on a bright, beautiful day. 

And this was what Fin had recognized most in Ken: heartbreak. In Fin’s work, heartbreak was a daily machination, and processing it was done by the body and mind after years of training oneself up to the task. Where cops faltered, where they broke, there was inevitable ruin. And it deserved to be addressed. 

“Taylor,” Fin said at long last. Barba heard it like the crush of metal, the shattering of glass, the life tearing clear of bodies in a three-car pile up. It didn't seem human, hearing a name in such a context.

“I’m sorry, man.” The sentiment came in at an angle, hitting neither the deed nor the crushing impact it had on Barba. “If I’d been closer to his position--”

“You’d have been shot, too,” Barba said, the sureness in his voice not cruelty painted with a broad brush, but the exacting line of fact, drawn with a razor from point A to point B. 

In the uneasy silence that followed, Barba was taken, stolen away into the past. Months, a year, into the last time he allowed himself to be driven by a member of the NYPD. Carisi was the exception to prove the rule. 

The blood in his heart seemed to dry up like a summer’s riverbed. He choked on the absence there, with _nothing_ parting his lips. Every thread of panic he felt was contained within his form; there was no expelling the demon, though he’d gladly take the offerings from any Santería-practicing auntie on Jerome Avenue.

Barba hadn’t known it then, but he surely knew it now: he was being delivered to certain death. 

What were the odds he’d again get lucky? 

_Carisi,_ he thought, hard like a prayer. This was Carisi’s fateful drive. Barba was only a passenger, trailing along from far away. Carisi, who was good and earnest and had a heart that beat a stronger tune than Barba’s. 

_Carisi_ could be that lucky. 

His cell phone buzzed in his jacket pocket, jolting Barba as if by electrocution. He scrambled to retrieve the device, both eager and dreading what he might be met with.

“Oh.” Disappointment colored Barba’s voice, but it was unseemly, so he bit back into it quick, swallowing a too-large piece. 

“Guilty,” he read of Calhoun’s text regarding the court proceedings he’d all but fled. “On all counts.” 

From the dark corners of his mind, where whispers of ruin curled around his ear, then unfurled across his cheek, Barba heard from the same voice that had been haunting him--for years now--with visions of his own demise. _Stolen fortune,_ the superstitions of his youth said, and were echoed by the fears instilled in his psyche by vindictive men at the heart of a damaged system. 

_You don’t need this. You just **want** it._

_You’re killing him._

Barba felt his skin prickle and set with unease. It was as though he’d run five miles, and was coming down cold under a sheen of sweat. He couldn’t meet Fin’s curious gaze--not when he felt like this--so he checked his phone again, imagining some text Carisi might have been able to send in a blazing moment of lucidity. _[I’m okay]_ or _[I love you]_ or _[don’t be mad, but--]_

Instead, Barba only saw missed calls from Benson, Rollins, and Fin, and none from Carisi. Despite it making perfect sense, the exclusion sank Barba’s heart.

Another text from Calhoun arrived, jolting his phone nearly out of the palm it was laid in.

_[Carmen cleared your schedule. Give her a call. She’s worried.]_

Barba’s phone startled again in his hand. The buzzing was loud for being surreptitiously silent, and it was a wonder he and the entire jury hadn’t heard it when everyone was trying to reach him in court that morning. His mind presently in varying states of shattered, blackened, and absent, Barba might have claimed conspiracy, but-- _perhaps_ \--tucked away in his briefcase, amid warm leather and starchy manila files, the grotesque shuddering of his phone--like the thrashing of a dying animal--was sufficiently muffled. 

An unknown number flashed across the screen, and while Barba had seen enough of those for a lifetime, he knew the rules had changed. 

The calls, he thought, were about to get a lot worse.

“Hello? Yes. _Yes,_ this is Rafael Barba.” He spoke quickly, loudly, in an effort to be heard amidst the phoning nurse’s calcified speech. She began with confirming his name, confirming Carisi’s, inquiring as to some basic knowledge one might have for the other. 

It was _torture._

“I’m enroute now,” Barba said, again stepping on her words as she recited the hospital’s address. He added, “Police escort,” in the hopes that she might mistake him for someone truly important, and be freer with her details if she thought there might be reprimands for treating him like she would anybody else. “What can you tell me about his condition?” 

He took to repeating bits of what she said, sometimes to confirm--as though he might hold it against her later if faced with a new outcome--but also, partly, to inform Fin. Barba felt as though if they had enough evidence, maybe they’d see the outcome before it hit. 

“I’m-- _I am family,_ that’s why I’m the emergency contact.” 

He silenced himself, unable in that moment to apologize for his tone, lest he have to explain himself and fall apart over his reasons.

Listening to the static voice calling from some ancient landline, decades unmoved from a reception desk, Barba fell into a state of religious submission. The words pressed into his ear gripped him for their processes alone--that he was being spoken to at all matter more than the vague sentiments being relayed. He’d pour over the words later, of course, ascribe them double- and deeper meanings, imbue them with purpose. But for as long as it was that he was held back from a rightful viewing of the truth, Barba would only have a single interpretation of the attendant’s pacing and inflection. 

In surgery and doing _well,_ or in surgery _and_ doing well? There were sermon’s worth of tangential arguments crafting themselves in Barba’s mind, spiraling towards that happiest end, and still more circling what could prove to be ominous, fateful warnings. 

And lest this voice closest to the source take to and smack the gum pinched against her cheek, and end her prophetic ramblings, Barba could only respond with _yes_ and _please_ and _thank you._

_**Yes,** more ambiguity._

_**Please,** less detail._

_**Thank you,** there’s satisfaction to be had in fearing more and knowing less than I did thirty seconds ago._

He tacked on that perfunctory thanks as the conversation ended, but the sentiment came off as tired and absent any sincerity. Barba held much the same attitude for two lagging minutes afterwards, as he tried to process what he was told with all that remained unknown. 

Fin didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and for that Barba was thankful. He didn’t think he was up to the task. 

Suddenly the hospital was upon them, and the dipping, turning, and corralling of their vehicle through the cramped underground parking proved too menial a task that Barba ducked out the moment the car slowed to a stop. In his haste, Barba lost Fin to the parking garage. He didn’t look back to throw an apology over his shoulder, and Fin knew well enough not to wait for one.

If Barba thought he was claustrophobic and lacking agency in the car, the hospital waiting room queued him up like a little league tee ball and took aim.

Tacky Christmas decorations still adorned the walls, each stuck with a rolled pinch of putty to the dull blue-and-off-white walls. Candy canes pranced along the entrance walls before petering off, and though the display struck Barba as garish, he took care not to sneer, or wonder aloud if this place had heard of the Gregorian calendar, or penicillin for that matter, or if time was a concept of no consequence here. Christmas was a week past, he told himself, and no one was wrong for wanting all that associated cheer and celebration to be stripped so far from wandering eyes, or so swiftly relegated to distant memory. 

_Some_ people didn’t spend the holiday season having unnecessarily cruel arguments with their lovers. _Some_ people didn’t feel like they were paying for them, now. 

Besides the decor, the space wasn’t empty, but then, Barba had never seen a hospital waiting room that was. 

Except it was _crowded,_ which didn’t seem like a fair trade. 

Barba stood silent amidst the clusters of uniformed officers, people who had been called to the 10-14, and followed it aimlessly. Rather than screaming out in his frustration, he chose instead to search, to assess what he could, and make his own determinations in lieu of asking others for their own. 

He tried to ignore why he’d make that choice, in this company, and how patience had no part in it. 

He stood out: despite the handsome suit, he was underdressed amidst the sea of parkas, gloves, and hats. Most had gone in hand or tucked half-into pockets. Some were kept in place, signaling the wearers as either optimistic or cynical. They expected a ready answer, a short wait. By their faces alone, Barba couldn’t place a strong bet. 

The moments he stood useless were the longest and most painful of his life. Absent information or purpose, and knowing he’d not necessarily find the former, and worse, that _waiting_ itself was his sole purpose, and was predicated on his succumbing to the former’s absence, Barba did his best to just… remain standing. 

He felt as though he’d suffered a long, deep cut along the curve of his belly, and all that was held above his waistline went spilling in wet, warm piles onto the floor. He couldn’t even bring himself to try and catch them, or stymie the flow. They’d be swept up later, those essential pieces of himself that _weren’t_ lying on an operating table. 

Alone, Barba was uncertain even in his endeavor to keep calm, to will what little steadiness he’d achieved into the air and steer this ship towards Carisi’s best end. 

In the strong thrum of a familiarly authoritative voice, Barba heard what it was he was waiting for, even if as determined only after the fact. 

Chief Deputy Dodds wasn’t a tall man, but his voice carried over the heads of those surrounding him--nurses and officers alike--all in an effort, it seemed, to draw Barba into his circle, never mind the figures he had to displace to get there. Dodds’ was a uniformed body Barba could count among the certain few who didn’t wish him harm, intentionally or by proxy, and more importantly--one who wished Carisi well. 

And one, it couldn’t be overlooked, who stepped into this situation with an overabundance of context. Beyond knowing the players, he’d seen the losing outcome. Barba suspected his caution existed on the back of the absent Dodds, which was all but confirmed with a remark made by the Deputy Chief to a passing nurse-- _Blood clots. Are you monitoring for blood clots?_

Perhaps there was some sense of self-preservation that he not lose a cop to a cop-related shooting, but more than that--and Barba _believed this_ \--Dodds positioned himself as the father, stood in place for the one who had not yet arrived.

A narrow passage opened between two uniformed officers and three city officials. The latter group had collectively ducked their heads towards their phones, relaying messages back to their offices. Barba took the pass, twisting left then right, and coming out clean on the other side.

He put himself in front of Dodds so as to signal--though Barba had no qualms about saying so directly--that he, well ahead of the NYPD, deserved answers. 

“Chief.”

“Counselor.” 

Dodds hesitated, like he was figuring out the best way to get his mouth around the name _Rafael,_ if things came to that. 

“Please don’t,” Barba interrupted. He didn’t want the fretting widow routine, the promises to placate his worry, the offer of coffee and hand-holding. He’d gotten one call, and not the other; if these things were coming, Barba resolved to see them from miles away.

Dodds drew in a steadying breath, conceding Barba’s point. 

“They’re optimistic. First surgery went very well.” Dodds lowered his voice, then, careful to say what he knew without it getting quoted out of turn. 

Dodds said, _“He’ll pull through.”_

It wasn’t what Barba expected to be told on the outset. A conclusion in the midst of a swell of uncertainty and fraying, sputtering starts felt at once ungrounded and over-promised. Good sense told him not to complain, given that he hadn’t really prepared himself for anything less, despite the crude determinations he’d made in Fin’s company. He’d imagined his own end a million and one ways, having had threats enough detailing his demise to get him started. But _Carisi_ \--who had youth, energy, and beauty to spare--always seemed untouchable. He’d suffer heavy blows to his emotional well-being, his psyche and the rest, but cutting down his form, like toppling a statue, was a wartime effort. It couldn’t happen out of the blue, absent any push.

A great ache tore through him, and Barba was left feeling sick for forgetting. 

Because there _was_ an unyielding war: all the times Carisi had come close to this point, or missed it by grateful miles, skirting it time and again by his own wiliness or that of others. The pressures mounted every night Carisi tucked himself under Barba’s arm in bed, feeling a little sick, a little scared, for no other reason than the odds flitting across the landscape of his mind. 

Barba knew that wasn’t fair; Carisi wouldn’t want to see his career from beat cop to detective be summed up so callously. But then, Carisi wasn’t one to be making any arguments. 

A burst of righteous anger jolted Barba from his daze. It stirred from his heart and churned in his gut, but Barba felt it specifically in his inner ear, like a shot had gone off. He was off to the races.

Dodds had more information now than Barba was privy to, and to hear it shared so willingly made him feel like it was traveling by whispers, all aimed to avoid his ears. Barba vered right, stepping to the one topic he knew would drag him into blistering clarity. 

“And Officer Taylor?” 

His voice didn’t break as he spoke the name, and if there was some power unvested from the bounds of the earth he had to thank for that small miracle, Barba did not wish to name it. Because with the gifts of angels came the tricks of demons, and the longer Barba waited for a reply, the more surprised he was to find himself feeling disillusioned.

It was some cold comfort, to think he could fill empty institutions with his small reserves of hope.

“The response I’m waiting for is usually a swift one, Chief.” 

Dodds worked the response at a twisted angle, as if he had to dig it out from the pits of an old coat pocket. He blew off some lint, dusted off the tired excuse and presented it as new or--worse--acceptable.

“We’re doing our due diligence.” 

_You’re coaching him up,_ Barba thought with a sneer. 

Barba kept the sneer, but lost the accusations--at least, in so many words. 

“Fine,” he said, trying to find measure in his tone. “The DA’s office is doing ours.” 

He failed, and in doing so heard his words slide to the same icy place he’d stepped into, moments after abandoning his post to stake a claim at Carisi’s side. It was more uselessness he could not abide by, and the propagated niceties he knew better than to swallow, even when passed on by the mouths of friends. He’d seen it from everyone who wore the colors or carried the badge--that tremendous error of placing one’s belief in their own packaged narrative, and decrying evidence to the contrary as slimy tactics, or politicization, or outright abuse, fettered on them by the world at large. They were purported victims of a situation burning from the inside out, nevermind their being the match to alight the core. 

It was Barba’s sole intention, then, to shatter their collective illusion. 

Dodds didn’t turn sour or cool towards Barba’s barely veiled threat; with suits like his, Barba wasn’t inclined towards subtlety, anyway. But Dodds pitied the man, his personal situation and responsibilities so deeply intertwined such that the choices he was left with now _possessed_ him. Dodds knew the feeling. 

“Take this any way you need to: I hear you, Counselor.”

The breath Barba took--the one meant only to calm his nerves--instead rattled through him, echoing against every facet of his emptied constitution. Without Carisi, without the certainty of his returning from once place to another, Barba was bereft. He did not have Carisi’s humanity to lead him, or his own confidence to wear as bluster or brawn. It was an assurance, however doctored by pretense, that Dodds knew Barba’s position, and unequivocally meant to satisfy it. 

He’d do this--whether Barba understood it now or not--in the only way that would matter. No mistakes. No assumptions. No half measures. 

A uniformed officer called Dodds’ name and he turned, relieving Barba of his gaze. 

And so their meeting was just that--succinct, terse. Though Barba carried a grudging respect for the man, and an appreciation for the impossible job with which he was tasked, he couldn’t square Dodds’ goals with where they were both stood on tiled floors, under fluorescent lighting. 

Protecting the NYPD’s own would mean concerning himself with the man with gunshot residue on his hands, as well as the injured parties bearing the brunt of his misdeeds. Barba suspected this would entail Dodds being seen on the news or quoted in papers as bemoaning the tragedy, as if there wasn't a named source. Barba, who knew his grudges to feaster after their moment had passed, wondered if he would ever forgive Dodds for his part in the NYPD’s personal protection racket. 

_No,_ was the simplest answer, reaching Barba with profound clarity.

That was how he knew he’d _feel,_ but insofar as his actions, Barba knew he was a shrewder player than that. 

Whatever happened, if Barba came away with a new streak of anger burned through his soul to cauterize the break, or if he was able to proudly bear the bruises, he would not be the quiet, supplicant figure. He would see Carisi through to survival, then wellness, and would ensure the man could still thrive, no matter what was left for him or of him. 

Because he was no longer the subject of Dodds’ attention, Barba allowed himself a moment’s panic. He saw the enemies he’d be making, if indeed every threaded notion of the system had been cut, and all Barba saw was a fixture to be surmounted, an obstacle of this unholy order. He saw the empty existence ahead of him, if what _should_ be done became a moot point.

His hands opened and closed at his sides, and even for operating in empty air, they seemed to have better traction than Barba could claim for either his wits or nerves. 

Every part of him took to gnashing, clinching, biting down--and not one thing found any pushback. Barba wanted to disappear himself into a fine dust, but the depths to which he could feel fear or desperation opened themselves to reveal a bottomless pit. That hadn't been Barnas experience, previously. There had been a breaking point--hed struck it hard and shattered.

Carisi had been there to gather him up.

He saw Benson and Rollins step out of the women’s washroom, their paired crowns of brunette and blonde setting them apart from a mass of neatly shorn or thinning heads. He hadn't been of a mind to find them, but doing so suddenly seemed like his only viable move, and he felt foolish for not asking after them the moment he arrived. 

He took steps enough to exit the loosely assembled crowd, then called out to Benson. His voice came stumbling out of the gate as if on trembling new legs. He hardly heard himself, but even for that he couldn't miss that it was _Rollins_ who locked eyes with him.

Immediately--before Barba could make her for relieved or wrecked or unmarred--he saw her falter. Whatever it was carved into her expression, she hid it and her whole face too, ducking away, then nearly plowing into her superior as she parted back through the bathroom door. She said something to Benson as she went, but for Barba, who did not know the why of her turning away, could scarcely then summon his explanation, let alone hers. 

He was demanding answers well before he arrived at Benson’s side. 

“What-- _why did she do that._ She rode with him here. Why--”

Benson tried to raise a hand, but could not beg his silence even then. Her fingers bit back into her palm and she spoke as though that too pained her, along with all the rest. 

“Rafa, please, she’s been through the wringer today--”

“And I will apologize for my behavior--later--if that’s what’s warranted. Jesus, Liv--does she think I won’t follow her into that bathroom?” 

When she did not reply, and when Barba realized he could not actually make her do so, the silence gave way to profound desperation on both their parts.

She opened her arms and he sank fitfully into the space. 

Benson gave Barba more of what he would expect, except that, too, horrified him. The embrace--while fast, secure, and genuine, nonetheless short-circuited his thoughts. And the words of comfort that spilled over his shoulder--they felt routine. These things fluttered like warning flags thrown indistinctly over the hospital playing field, but still Barba’s broken heart bent forwards, aching to touch what was most familiar. 

He reasoned she felt much the same way. 

He never could have imagined the extent.

It _gutted her,_ seeing him. She dreaded the ruin that would come to consume him, if life should again turn its back to those she loved, and strike an errant hand, and fell one of her own.

She kept him held so that their hearts beat furiously against one another, but neither saw the terror reflected in their faces. Benson knew it may well shatter his confidence to see her wide eyes tinged with red as she struggled to keep a brave front for her colleagues and subordinates.

She worried he could hear her screaming thoughts, anyway.

_Not again. Please, God, not again._

Barba, likewise, did not pull back and force a more prolonged confrontation. He shared her fear of breaking down, of being no good for one’s own best friend. 

Each recognized the shared title, and lamented the months that had stretched out between them where so little passed to glorify that fact. Absent any late night conversations, scores of bored texts, or wet lunches, there was only this: a great, terrible happening to make up for lost time.

“Rafael.”

She spoke, perhaps prompted by a few shed tears that were not her own dapple in her hair. 

Barba sucked in a wet breath but found he could not answer her, and hoped she had words enough to fill every empty space. 

She said, “I’m sorry.”

She said, “Everything will be okay.”

She said, “He’ll make it.”

Benson seemed to repeat the latter sentiment a hundred times over, until it was nothing but a hum against Barba’s cheek. 

Neither put out into the world what it was she truly meant to say: _I have to believe he’ll make it._

There was no more pressing and necessary lie than that. 

-

Over dinner one night, months ago, back when they thoughtlessly delighted in the respectable pantomime of domestic life, Carisi had told Barba about Dodds’ death. Carisi told Barba the things he couldn’t know, after they’d left his crisis to attend to another. 

The conversation grew from a hypothetical, one that hadn’t reached Carisi then, but was long lying in wait. 

With some necessary prompting, Carisi spoke at length of the uncertainty, the waiting. The idle things they did to feel useful.

_“I donated blood,_ Carisi offered, a keener’s example. _“This was before us.”_

That the specification wasn’t completely needless wasn’t something Barba picked up on at the time. He tried to remember if he looked bored or smug for the insinuation, or if it registered at all. 

Carisi spoke on and around the topic, until he arrived at its bruised and tender core. 

_“He looked okay. He was sitting up, talking. Smiling. His family was coming, his fiance. I didn't once doubt he’d walk outta there with them. He’d done it before.”_

It made sense, and Barba had nodded along, following the story for as long as it stayed linear, then jutted left, right, and cratered. Carisi wouldn’t care to hear it--and Barba didn’t say--but the situation held, narratively. Dodds’ tragedy came long before the bullet that stole him away. 

But Barba hadn’t been there, he didn’t _know._ His thoughts and opinions could rest easy in the safety nets he had been afforded: distance from, and even a little distaste of, the man himself. Dodds had followed in his father’s shadow, and what’s worse--it was obvious he didn’t much appreciate the shade. 

And still he’d followed, good and told. 

Barba was, in parts, embarrassed for the man’s obvious subservience and jealous as to how well being the good son had worked out for him. He was hung up on the success, whether it was passed down or spilled over or simply inherent. Barba couldn’t help the awful taste that flooded his mouth when Dodds pitched his impression of his father’s authoritative voice over the squadroom, or worse--in Barba’s own office. It flooded past his teeth and squelched out down his chin. It spotted his shoes and stained the carpets. 

Barba wasn’t naive enough to wonder why a weak man would do that, but he saw Dodds’ work and wondered why a better man would bother. 

Dodds aside, Barba simply did not know the hospital layout. His most recent visits had been under the guise of a representative for the City, which allowed him to be ushered in and out, to look and speak calmly to victims with the same terrified look in their eyes. He was led everywhere, and was never forced to wander. 

Barba hadn’t been to a hospital for any other reason in years. 

Over a decade, he thought, though he knew the exact date. 

Barba swallowed hard and focused on Carisi and the things he’d said about Dodds, and--however callously--made up his mind to take note from that experience, apply its lessons, and perhaps sure up loose ends. 

He couldn’t donate blood, he supposed. 

At the very least, Barba had reassembled himself. He stood with his back straight as a rod, chin raised slightly, eyes bright and alert. He couldn’t help where he was still afflicted: his brow looked as though a needle and thread had been taken through the skin, and cinched between his glassy eyes. All the same, he willed himself out of his own thoughts and immersed himself in the situation at hand. He felt _less_ about it, somehow, and that concerned him all the more. 

He turned to Benson, who was stood at his side and whose grip had claimed his hand.

“Has his family been contacted?”

“Shit. _Fuck.”_

Carisi was her family, theirs. The desire to keep them all close did not allow Benson to so swiftly outstretch her hand and collect a whole host of others. Barba watched as she retrieved her phone with shaking hands.

“I’ll do it,” Barba said, his words following the verbal cue set by his actions: his hand shot out, landed atop of hers, and deferred her intentions.

“Rafael, no--”

_“I said I’ll do it.”_

He was short with her, and he knew why. It was better angry than frightened, better to explode in fury than to sink into unabatting misery. Keeping his sensibilities sharp wouldn’t settle his nerves so much as combat them on their own level. Barba would not, he decided, fall completely prey to fear. It would not loom over him and pick at his juiciest parts; he’d thrash and kick and fight, even in futility. 

Barba set about the task. Deep down, he knew this was his cruel streak at work. It was barely shy of a taunt, making this call: _**I’m** here. Where are **you?**_

And to an observer only as shrewd as he was, doing this would cement his _being_ there--being in-the-know--as evidence of his _belonging_ there. 

He decided to cull those instincts and try to be kind--another fight, in its own way. It was Dom who answered an unknown caller with warmth and simple curiosity enough that it made Barba’s heart tear itself in two, with the halves only drawn together by narrow strands of muscle and tissue. It was Barba who, knowing the news he was due to deliver, ripped those lingering threads apart, thinking, _You can have this back once you’ve done it._

“Dom, it’s Rafael Barba.” 

That was all he had, up until the lie he’d been told, a lie that was less information than even what he knew, but somehow twice as good.

“Sonny is okay. He’s okay, but--”

When Barba spoke those impossible words, he didn’t sound either cruel or kind, only sad, which seemed altogether a useless compromise. He stated the facts, none of which seemed to apply to Carisi so much as to himself. Barba was inviting Dom only into his same situation. _Wait here with me. Torture your spirit. Tell yourself every lie and do this constantly, because the odds are right down the hall._

“Dom,” Barba started again after he was met by a long and steady silence. “Are you there?”

The only response was Dom speaking away from the receiver, and Kitty’s voice, right next to Dom’s but somehow infinitely more distant.

She asked her husband what was wrong and he did not answer her. 

Barba spoke again: “Let me send a car--” 

Dom repeated what Barba had told him: the name of the hospital, the street address, and the fastest route into the City. Every word about his son, Dom kept to himself. 

“You stay there,” Dom said with some force. That booming voice--or perhaps Barba’s nerves--had the phone shaking against his ear. “You stay with him. And you tell him we’re coming.”

The last of Dom’s words weren’t for Barba. His tone softened into warm, worn leather. 

_“Kitty. Tesoro. Listen…”_

Quietly, Barba asked of Benson, “Did that go well? Does this kind of thing… ever…” 

Reading the expression of unfolding concern on Barba’s face, Benson made a proposal: She’d meet them. She’d meet them just off the ferry, and chaperone them into the City.

“Can you call them back, and tell them?” Benson asked, even as she stood and gathered her coat, showing she did not intend to wait and see the deed was done.

“They shouldn’t be driving in all this,” Barba agreed, thinking of Dom’s heart problems, of _Kitty,_ full stop.

But the idea of being left alone without Benson’s calm counsel actually made him frightened. Nevermind what he would say or do without her; he’d surely feel all the more lost, untethered from his and Carisi’s shared reality. 

He’d be alone, and terrified, and spent, and overwrought.

_Again._

His hand was held tight in Benson’s until the last possible moment, both squeezing, neither knowing where they found the strength. But even that afforded little comfort. She was scared, too, and those feelings only seemed to pass between them, an awful current, alternatively revving and dulling their systems. Barba felt sick for the constant rush and wane, but could not bring himself to tug free. 

This had to be better than nothing. 

He wanted Carisi, of course. Carisi, whose hope and belief in goodness favoring those bearing the most pain knew no depths. Carisi had faith, and even if Barba didn’t share it, there was comfort in knowing _someone_ thought there was purpose in life, and in its loss. Carisi’s radical belief was a kind of catch-all for when Barba’s own well of efforts had gone dry. 

It used to frustrate Barba, that sort of thinking. In Carisi, he found it a curious source of strength: not to hope, only, but to trust. Barba felt that absence acutely, and seemed to hold himself as if it had been cut manually from his side. He shifted, twisting slightly to keep anything else from taking purchase in the opening, and slipping away. 

Barba felt emptied, as if he’d been sliced open, his body drawn up by his heels in an effort to disorient his thinking. Not knowing Carisi’s fate was like being bled alive, drained of his senses and bereft of his ability to hold to the very ground under his feet. His own humanity flowed readily out of him. 

And for such a smooth descent, Barba almost didn’t mind it.

Benson, turned around in circles by her dual senses of duty, left Barba in this state. With another strong embrace, she was gone. 

For a time, Barba held his position, stood as an island amidst a room full of beat cops, none of them speaking to him because they knew who he was or they didn’t. Slowly, the indignity that kept his legs ramrod straight relocated to his heart, and Barba sat down, the only other option seemingly to sink to the floor. 

Barba wanted to be brave. He wanted not to breeze through this burden, but to tackle it, to beat it. His mind made noises towards triumph, and however he might see Carisi to that end. The man would have to _survive,_ first, but Barba assumed that much for argument’s sake, and because his heart couldn't bear the alternative. There was work to be done from the outside, without Carisi’s immediate input. Barba tucked into them like a feast. 

There would be an investigation into the wrongful shooting, and a trial, if he had any say. The outrage that gripped him would mirror itself in certain corners of the city. If he didn’t get his trial, he would join their ranks, screaming with the same hurt and fear that hummed, a single thread drawn tight as it joined the crowd. He wouldn’t be alone in _that._

He followed every twisting thought, possibility, and outcome. At the very least, it gave him something to focus on for all of--Barba checked his phone--five minutes. 

He scrubbed his face with the palm of his hand, cleared his throat, and called Carmen. His intention was to open up his schedule for an extended hospital stay--Carisi’s, but Barba’s too, in a way--and in his own voice heard none of the grit and determination he’d imagined for himself.

That thread had gone slack, and his voice wobbled along with it. Barba knew it wasn’t just in his head, because she quietly confirmed she’d done just that, as well as made plans to reassign his present caseload. 

“Yes,” Barba said, and if he were any less certain in his wording, he’d have made it a question. “Thank you.” 

Then, “He'll be okay,” he said, and felt stupid because she did not ask, and he did not know. 

“What can I do?” Carmen implored. Her voice, Barba noted, did not break as easily as his. “I could go to your apartment and gather a few of his things…”

“That may be premature,” Barba murmured, and again regretted it. 

Carmen was silent. 

“Rafael…”

It was so rare that she’d call him by his name that Barba was saddened to add this instance to the pile. 

“I’m being morbid,” he said by way of apology. He could hear his own voice echoing against the landline in Carmen’s office. “Forgive me. Um, there hasn’t been any word on his condition, either way.”

He finished speaking and waited a beat. Barba wasn't sure what to expect after fulfilling these minor requirements, and feared breaching the modes of decorum if he began to ramble on, saying every heartbroken and fearful word that plotted within him. And if he did, would she know him for alone, sat in some hospital too-near his apartment to feel convenient, but instead, ominous? 

“Call your mom,” she said, figuring exactly that. 

Barba agreed just to end the call, but he didn’t think he would. His first line of defense was doubt and mistrust; his mother had made strides when it came to accepting every measure of her son, but was this not her fairest warning, come to fruition? That it would all end in misery? Would she not acknowledge her foresight as prophecy? 

A hard line drew itself down his spine and Barba told himself he didn’t want to hear her concern, whether or not she had to summon it or had it wafting off her shoulders like a heavy perfume. 

Barba feared what he would get, if he asked for anything. 

He held to that decision for all of five minutes, all of them spent sinking into a soft swell of memory. There had been a time where his mother was all he had, when he glowed under her support and suffered from her disregard twice in the same breath. There were times he could have sworn she’d rather undo him, and times still where he’d wished he was undone, and she alone could argue in his favor. 

_Stick with Alex. He’ll be Mayor of New York one day._

_He’s wrong, Rafi. Your father is **wrong.**_

_You can’t have anything with a man. Only a secret._

What terrified him more than the prospect of his comeuppance was that-- _again_ \--it might be Barba and Lucia, _smart-mouthed Rafi and his poor mami,_ each the entirety of what the other had. They’d lived too long like that, a tight partnership generated by the awful circumstances in which they’d found themselves. 

Barba did not wish to invite that existence into being any sooner than necessary.

But distress seared through his veins like a deadly disease, and his hands moved without his say-so. As the sudden sting of tears bit at the corners of his eyes, Barba heard his voice heave and give out.

“Mami?”

-

_I’m at the hospital, mami._

_No, no, I’m fine._

_Sonny…_

_Sonny._

-

It was only between ending the call with his mother and receiving Lucia’s and Carmen’s dueling texts-- _[I’m 20min out] [30. Fuck the MTA.]_ and _[Did you call your mother yet?]_ \--that Barba saw clearly the tactics of the women in his life, their relationships supposedly personal and professional--though that divide rarely held--mirroring one another to best reflect his needs. 

They spoke with him, sat with him, made plans and plotted deliverables. Carmen knew when to allow for space and stand a hair’s length away, respectively. Lucia kept to the staples, ubering her son meals when he missed one too many of her calls to, at the very least, guilt him into a ‘thank you’ text. They knew how to care for him, while his own attempts on that front were lacking in return, always tipping towards his strengths: legal advice and coffee. He gave what he thought everyone wanted: clarity and routine. 

What he received was open arms and the keen insights he didn’t often expect of others, much less demand of himself outside the courtroom. Despite his best efforts towards reservedness and self-sufficiency, they knew how he’d be, sat alone with only his thoughts.

It was daunting, the way their efforts stacked up.

With a carry-on still stickered from a morning return flight from Miami, Lucia arrived within the hour to hold his hand--literally, she gripped it tight, affirming for him that he was not alone in his misery and concern.

And, perhaps picking up on another fear of his, she said nothing of what brought them together at ten in the morning on a weekday, if not a long-planned and oft-passed over brunch. 

In a few fumbled mutterings, he apologized to her, meaning the disruption to her day, though the reason why came to both parties at once: Barba needed to both hold his vigil and be witnessed for doing so, because there was guilt enough inside him to fool his mind into forgetting his place here, sat out in a waiting room, penned in with family and friends. 

Lucia had once thought as much for herself, having left her husband--never fully, but _enough_ \--and nonetheless following him into a hospital room, and taking a seat like it had always been hers.

Her son’s presence would confirm her own--here was a thing she and this great and terrible man made, and shared implicitly. He was always the reason for their coming apart, their coming together. 

She never told Barba as much; he’d hate every bit of that particularly truth. 

Lucia kissed and patted his cheek. _Never mind any of that._

She opened her purse and handed him the bottle of ibuprofen she kept there. A rarity for her, but she got in the habit of carrying the pain reliever for her son. It was the only thing he’d ever snuck from her purse as a child--that, and on one memorable occasion, her lipstick.

He gratefully tapped four from the bottle and threw them back dry. 

“ODing on those won’t get you in his room any faster,” Lucia tutted, catching her son’s eye as he swallowed. Dark humor had always been their retreat from the pits of despair--more Barba’s than Lucia’s, so he could appreciate the effort made on her part. 

Barba longed to feel his teeth cut into an ugly, grim little smile, but none willed its way onto his features. 

“He’s still in surgery.” 

“Well, it won’t get you there _first.”_

Her son nodded in all seriousness, not taking her words as the joke she intended, but rather for a fact on the board. This stayed with Lucia, the familiarity leaving her strangely breathless. The hard set of his brow coupled with a stare that drifted listlessly was too much a thing she’d seen of herself, in the mirror, back when necessity crowded her young life. 

His posture--in this setting--reminded Lucia of her own during her pregnancy, of the terrible morning, noon, and night sickness Rafael imparted on her well before she’d even met him. She’d been young, and scared for all the ways her body seemed to twist and threaten to break around the life growing inside her. Lucia remembered how her husband grew tired of the vomiting, her restless sleeping, the time she spent lost to the emergency room convinced something was terribly wrong. 

Lucia never told Barba he’d been a difficult pregnancy, though some part of her believed the experience colored her husband’s perception of their child, and maybe Barba would find something in that to understand. 

She’d talked herself out of it countless times; her son knew his father to be a petty man. There were pins in his jaw and a spider’s web of lines on x-ray scans to attest to that. 

There, sat in plastic chairs linked by metal rods, a centipede’s worth of legs all whining on linoleum floors, both Barbas realized how far they were from anything they’d ever wanted for themselves or hoped for those they loved.

“Thank you for coming,” Barba repeated. “I don't know what it is I expect you can do…”

Lucia shook her head; it was hardly a mystery.

“You just want me here.”

Her son ducked his head slightly, which he only ever did when he was genuinely ashamed of himself, and not his usual fare of _being_ shamed, and gladly showing his face through it all. 

“I didn't do that for you.”

It was true, he’d strayed from her side when she awaited her husband’s fate, and simply not wanting to be there was the least of it. He’d said cruel things, cast snide looks at her deliverance to and from the hospital chapel. She'd been angry at the time, embarrassed for his overt refusal of tact and the expected.

She wasn't angry, anymore. 

She wasn’t blind, either.

“It wasn’t like this, for me.”

Quietly--so much so that Lucia wasn’t certain it was even her son speaking--Barba murmured, “If he dies and I have to just…” he paused, the insinuation there, hanging aloft between them. “It just doesn't seem fair.” 

The words were heavy but carried little purchase. Lucia could just as well have heard them on the awful breath of whiskey her son favored, a predilection picked up from a man she was never introduced to in genuine terms--a roommate, a friend, a professor. She shouldn’t have given them much mind, but they struck her not as triflingly sad, but _dangerous._

Lucia knew her son, despite his repeated utterances to the contrary. She’d raised her darling boy into this sometimes petulant, always heartfelt, profoundly ambitious, deeply righteous man. She knew it was not solitude he feared, or even desertion, but ambivalence. If people didn’t love him or hate him, Barba was quick to question their intentions entirely. 

Extremes guided him, never mind his insistence that the gray landscape of the law had tempered those impulses. He was brazen in much the same way as he could be driven into depressions; if it was to be done, he’d do it splendidly. If all would lead to ruin, he would go, battling through every step.

It explained Carisi, certainly. Blonde and blue-eyed, tall and white and _male_ as they came. When she’d first learned of him, Lucia thought it was _the English Literature minor_ situation all over again. Bound for Harvard Law, for the most intensive two years of his academic life, and Barba had a second look around and thought he’d sample something from across the way.

A thing plucked from an institution otherwise so far removed from him, Lucia wasn’t sure if her son would know what to do with it. 

But of course he loved it. He brought it to dinner parties (“No one wants to talk tort reform over canapés, mami.”) and home after exams. He made it work for him, wielding the tools as though he thought to manually pave his rocky path into the veins of chosen society. 

But more than that--more than the reasoning he composed to account for the ever-more sleepless nights, the stress and the near-unmanageable load--he loved it. He loved the tragedy and willfulness of creation. 

The _boy,_ Carisi, fell into much the same category. 

However solemnly Lucia dug a word out of him, Barba spoke of Carisi like an equal partner to his wild undertaking--a life, built as they would have it, over-stuffed with work and purpose, delights nestled into the corners. This was a life he was beginning to find more that mere professional gratification in, with a man he still spoke shyly of, as if every mention were the first she was hearing about it.

To hear him for desperate now made her uneasy. In retrospect, it was the same tone of voice he used to cancel lunches and dinners during the year that preceded his attack. He was speaking for the threats then, and he did so now. 

She drew him in, bringing his head to rest on her shoulder, then smoothed his hair, like she had when he was a child. The worrying thing was, he let her. It was only for a moment, so brief and contained that when it was over, Lucia thought she could pluck it from the air, and inspect it from all sides. But her son quickly came to his senses, disentangling himself from her efforts to comfort him. She saw embarrassment color his cheeks and anger purse his lips. From the look on his face, she knew what he was thinking. 

He was remembering why he’d needed such comfort as a child, all their time together, then all the more time apart, and distance, and silence, and every reason why that had to be.

He sank back and away so as to only occupy the space afforded by his seat, and not an inch into her’s. She reached out and patted the hand he had gripping his knee, as if the coldness of his long memory didn’t hurt her, too.

Being alone was punishment for loving someone too much. That’s how Lucia felt about life after her husband, sometimes. She did not want that for her son. 

She began to speak quietly, but incessantly. She spoke at length about aimless topics--the flight from Miami she’d just returned from, a lion’s share of the gossip from family there. She did this to soothe him, because it was a lighter touch than her own hand, this--the old tactic used to settle her thoughtful, worrisome child’s ever-racing mind.

In truth, Lucia never really knew the distraction route to work for him. He always seemed to screw up his face, frown and stay silent until he had a solution to his problems. He spent nearly three decades frowning. 

He nodded all the same, however, when she drew in a breath but found nothing to spend it on. 

“That’s all good to hear,” he said quietly, of the flight, the family gossip, and morning traffic. “Thank you.” 

He hadn’t been listening, but Lucia didn’t think he’d arrived at any solutions, either. 

She could almost hear it herself: the silence roaring between his eardrums. The absence of collective thought. 

She took in the scene around them--warily, at first. She’d never warmed to the company her son took in the persuasion of law enforcement. She knew neither had forgotten the way police ran roughshod through their community, knocking down doors whenever they pleased, disappearing boys clear off the sidewalk, leaving their mothers worrying, but not wondering, where they’d gone. They were old nerves and she couldn’t loosen them now. 

Realizing where she’d come--and for what--Lucia knew she’d already given her best effort. She sighed, feeling finished. After a moment, it was her head that sloped and rested distinctly on her son’s shoulder, its weight pooling there. 

Maybe this wasn’t like before, she thought. Maybe it wouldn’t do to dig up a relic of her son’s childhood, and engage in a practice where they both held their aches in silence and proximity.

Perhaps what he needed was someone to share in and acknowledge his pain. 

“I love him too, mijo.”

Barba fought every impulse to scramble from his seat and regard her fully. He pinched his eyes closed, even, so as not to be drawn to search her face for genuine meaning. Yet, the feeling passed in an instant, leaving Barba dizzy for the whiplash. He realized with all the grace of a shattered porcelain bowl that _this_ was what Carisi wanted: to feel good about his choices not because they were permitted or tolerated, but because they were _welcomed_ for being shared. He supposed he’d always known the designation of those ideas, but not knowing their intoxicating power made him ignorant to their pull.

Barba had thought he’d long given up on praise when even acceptance seemed so distant, yet here were both, dropped before his eyes as they sank ever downward, tracking tragedy as it sank into an infinite abyss.

_She loves him too,_ Barba thought. _He may never know it._

He tried to listen as Lucia again played her hand at offering words enough to fill the void. She carried on in Spanish, encouraging as much from her son, who surrendered a few one-word replies when proded. It was unnatural to speak for the sake of it; ever since he was young, their discussions were prompted out of necessity, queries first and solutions after. Were the bills paid, or could he help? Why was he bleeding, and did he need to go to the hospital? Could Eddie stay the night, or was his father going to be home? 

They’d always talked _plans._ It was Cuba coloring their vernacular, even for being hundreds of miles away, and decades too late. They planned ways of getting out and getting in, of making one’s way in a world absent any open door back home. Just living felt like a constant rush forward, because standing idle put their backs against the wall, and threatened inclosure. 

It used to be feverish work, sometimes predicated on wild flights of fancy. A young Barba once planned for his second presidential term. When he’d gone away to Harvard and when she fell a little bit in love with a fellow educator at her school, Lucia planned a life that felt renewed, a marriage that wasn’t haunted. 

Neither plot came to pass, and for all the best. They’d learned, amidst their ferver, to accept the stagnant times--the spells without money or a job or a lover. And because they’d done that, Lucia thought they were as best-prepared as they could be for right now, where every move was predicated on another man’s life, and though there were odds to consider, it was no hypothetical to jostle around and bite into for entertainment. 

They could only sit, stagnant. 

Mumbling, Barba eventually asked Lucia to go. He cited her having just returned to the City-- _You must be tired, Mami. You haven’t unpacked._ \--but really, he was terrified that the longer she stayed, the greater the chance that he’d find himself needing her there. The dismissal hurt, but Lucia understood. He was foolishly afraid that her presence gave him permission to fall apart, if the situation called for it. Perhaps, surrounded by cops and colleagues, he would hold himself together not just with fortitude, but out of spite.

They both knew he was a little out of his mind. Insane, if he thought to grant a kind of immunity to the possibility that the worst would happen, and his reaction would matter. 

_Nothing would matter,_ after a point.

“But you’ll call me.”

It was how they said their goodbyes, these days.

“As soon as I know anything. Yes. You have my word.” 

“Rafael…” 

She didn’t want this for him. If there was one instance in all her life that she could get her son to change his mind, she hoped this was it. 

But her Rafi was committed to his choice. He took her hand.

“I’ll walk you out.”

When he stopped shy of the double doors, Lucia thought perhaps he’d changed his mind. Perhaps he needed her in a childish way he’d really never been, in that he could not articulate himself. 

Then she saw them: an older couple, totally unremarkable save for the company they kept in Lieutenant Benson, and--upon closer inspection--the man’s pale blue eyes being a pair she’d seen before, over a rare shared meal, and most often in the midst of a laugh, or focused softly on her son. They were Carisi’s parents, she knew at once, and from the unsettled look the petite mother was giving her son, they'd already met.

The air that arrived through the automated doors was somehow dry and processed, as if the City had churned what was cold and coming in off the Atlantic through subway grates until stripped of its better qualities, then deposited it at the backs of the senior Dominick and Kitty Carisi.

Above them, the fluorescent light paled and burned all at once. It made both parties look wane, even for the mid-afternoon hour. What terrible thing had upended the earth they stood on and brought them together. 

Kitty struck out for four steps’ worth of hospital-issued linoleum tiled floor, approaching Barba. 

“Was this you?” she hissed, drawing close enough to Barba to strike him, a thought that crossed Barba’s mind because he felt the same helpless impulse to lash out, though neither made such a move. She only clutched at her cardigan, hanging open under her half-zipped coat. It was the best she could do shy of bracing her own heart.

Kitty regarded her subject, stunned as he was into brokenhearted silence. 

_“Did this happened because of you?”_

His own assault had never felt so distant in memory and purpose than right now, and Barba could scarcely connect the dots--few and far between as they were--between a year-long onslaught, slow and meandering until it crossed the threshold of his home, and the few seconds spent to threaten his partner’s life, and upended his whole sense of self in the process. 

“No,” Barba finally said, and only that, because he could not trust himself to elaborate.

Kitty stared hard for a moment longer, wondering where all the highfalutin talk had gone. Her anger burned itself up in that one go, and as her shoulders sank, her husband of more than half her lifetime was there to envelop her in his arms. 

Benson’s gaze moved to Lucia, missing Barba entirely. She said something purposeful and soft, and was able to steer the Carisis away. She had already spoken to them, it seemed, because they weren’t a complete mess. They were stricken, and no better for operating between the extremes of deepest fear and toiling hope. They had been led, like Barba had, into this apparent new reality, and they meant to resist for as long as they could.

Barba could sympathize.

“They're just scared,” he said when the anger radiating from his mother finally got to be too much. She loosened her grip on his hand as a result, but her concerns were not sated; rather, she’d caught herself thinking wildly, _Who is this man?_

Because Lucia had never in her life known her son to make exceptions and excuses for disrespect. 

She wondered if _now_ he would remember himself. She waited second after painful second but the moment never came, and the other man’s family sat close to one another far away from where Barba had stationed himself, and they were met by uniformed officers who shook their hands and murmured useless introductions. 

And still, her son stared weakly at the hospital doors, seeing nothing for them or beyond them. She might have reached out and touched him, had he not seemed, to her, lost to that same intermediary state, lodged between two panes of impenetrable glass.

She did an about-face, pivoting from her son’s side to approach the Carisis. Lucia didn’t rush the finish line like Kitty had; she wasn’t driven by the same brand of fury and heartbreak. Her’s was one removed, both her sense of urgency and agency tempered, the taste less bitter--more mournful--in her mouth.

The words that fell from her lips were touched by that difference, as evidenced in their ordering themselves more peaceably than Lucia expected for herself.

She gave her name, then clarified, “I’m Rafael’s mother.”

She said, “You’ve raised a sweet and strong and--” the word arrived not because Lucia didn’t know any better, but because she knew _exactly_ enough, “--genuine young man.” 

Barba wasn’t near enough to hear the Carisis’ replies. 

He did hear Lucia’s promise, however: “I’ll light a candle for him at Sacred Heart’s.”

And one for him, not doubt, as she always did, praying for his safety and happiness--one recently lost, the other recently gained, though he was very much on the verge of losing that, too, in his usual spectacular fashion.

She returned to her son, who met her with a strange look of relief tinged with wonder. Lucia thought about it for the entirety of the taxi ride to that little piece of bitten-off curb ahead of the church of her choosing, the one she’d attended when Rafael was young, but hadn't claimed for her own since moving out of their old apartment. 

She liked her new church--it was recently renovated, with clean carpets and a new ceiling treatment that made the rafters look impossibly chic and sky-high. She didn't think a miracle could happen under that roof, just yet, and her faith wasn't such that she could chance it. 

Which was why she went home, thinking maybe since the dust had settled, one could stir up from the earth under their oldest haunt.

-

Barba had gone back to his seat ahead of the bustling open hallway, still partially under the impression he could be first to receive any news, but also because he figured he couldn’t count on preferential seating among Carisi’s family. He did not feel owed, nor particularly wanting of, the invitation. If the laws of physics weren’t so stringent, he wouldn’t have sat with himself, either. 

He didn’t think explicitly about life and death, or life and ruin, or how in his life he had come to know a great many iterations of the game. He didn’t think about the guilt he felt, feeling like he’d brought Carisi closer to this very kind of conflict, and not just for being in the neighborhood. He’d walked death into his apartment once before, and now it had gotten lost twelve blocks north and around the corner. 

His thoughts didn’t linger on where he was and wasn’t wanted. Admittedly, he couldn’t name the places they went over the course of the next five hours.

Ideas meandered, lost their shape, disintegrated by halves as the minutes ticked by. He drifted, sailed, and drowned in turns. Barba wouldn’t put it past himself to have dipped sideways into uneasy fits of sleep, though he never felt rested for the journey. 

Benson made the rounds again. Barba was quick enough then to ask how she was doing, putting the onus on her for serving the impossible response. They sat together a moment, but Benson’s instincts drew her back to the worried family. She left Barba with a kiss to his forehead and an encouraging squeeze of his shoulder. 

But she did not leave him alone. 

“Oh,” Barba heard from her, a brief ways off. “Thank you for coming.”

He caught a whiff of lilac moments before she came into view, but it wasn’t time enough to school his expression into one worthy of his standing in regards to her’s.

Carmen arrived with the same fearlessness that put her at Barba’s side during a press conference, cool, collected, and unperturbed. Barba swallowed down a grimace. He wasn’t sure how to feel, seeing her like that, all steel and poise. He was so used to Carmen bringing him bad news, even if by the same token, she was always the one to stand it first. 

Her coat hung loose over her houndstooth sheath dress and black stockinged legs. Even for her booted feet, Barba thought she was underdressed for the weather. Then again, he was one to talk.

Carmen came to make that point herself: Draped over her right arm was Barba’s own camel-colored coat, previously abandoned to the courthouse cloakroom. The coffee in her left hand met his at once, sending sparks of normalcy into Barba’s weakened system. To wit, it would only be much later that Barba noticed a new weight in his coat pocket--a phone charger. 

She'd brought only the necessities. 

He murmured his appreciation--the coat, the coffee, her company. 

He took a sip of coffee instinctively, and while the blend was smooth and the taste welcome, Barba’s stomach twisted around the dribbled offering, and the cup fast found its place on the floor, tucked in safely at the chair’s front left leg.

Carmen sat next to him and stared like she meant to catalogue his state of being and suss out the causes rather than ask outright. 

They didn’t embrace; Carmen’s coolness was no act, and professionalism chased after the blood running through her veins such that it was neck and neck, most days. 

Careful, as though mindful of their relationship and Barba’s ruined spirit, Carmen began to speak. Barba first heard it much in the same family as his mother’s attempts to distract and mollify him with distant concepts, except what Carmen spoke of didn’t so much as creep up on him as beat him over the head. 

The day’s verdict was in their favor, she told him. His scheduled had been cleared, and his current caseload was redistributed amongst his colleagues. She gave all the whys and hows to her reasoning, though Barba trusted her judgement regardless. After a beat, she added that both Calhoun and Judge Bertuccio sent their regards. She said nothing of Reevely, though Barba wouldn't have held his breath for that anyway. 

The world hadn’t stopped in reverence of Carisi’s pain, much less Barba’s anguish over it. 

“How is it?” She asked this simply, almost as if she was more curious than sympathetic. 

“A crime was committed and I don’t know a goddamn thing about it,” Barba said, because it felt like the most explanation he could give without coming apart. He tried to joke, “Flipping the script isn’t really working for me--” 

His voice broke--shattered, really--on the tail end of his line, just as a woman in blue-green scrubs paused just ahead of them, then kept moving. 

She’d only been checking her phone.

Barba covered his mouth with his hands, wiping his upper lip as though he suspected a flop sweat. Slowly, he sank his whole head into his hands. 

It hit him--not while speaking to his mother or hearing platitudes from Deputy Chief Dodds or Benson, but in the presence of his assistant, who was accomplished and trustworthy, but so grossly out of place bringing him his coat and pitching her voice so tenderly, and watching her boss come apart all the same. 

This was dangerous, still. 

Waiting and hoping and planning was not the safety net people liked to think; Barba was stranded out in the open, an easy target for the worst news. 

“I don’t know what’s happening,” Barba repeated, as if he thought his first attempt wasn't so sincere. “I haven’t heard anything since this morning.”

Carmen nodded, and by the slow, prolonged effort of the gesture, Barba knew she was thinking deeply. She never lacked for a considerate word, so Barba wasn't entirely surprised when her efforts did not go towards offering one. 

“I spoke with the DA,” she said, adding, “In the hallway” to convey it wasn’t a formal meeting called by either party. “He hasn’t assigned anyone yet.”

Barba, in an attempt to be cautious, answered with the reason Carmen did not feel fit to give. 

“I suppose he doesn’t know the extent…” his frown twisted; he didn’t want to finish that sentence. “...What all the charges could be.”

Carmen met his gaze, steadier now than she had been.

“He knows enough.”

It dawned on Barba that Carmen wasn’t gossiping, necessarily. She was giving a warning. _Things are slow,_ she said without saying anything. _Worryingly slow._ Although the terms were regularly traded and interchanged amid the press and politicians, Carmen and Barba both knew the profound differences between _caution_ and _inaction_ and _indifference._ For an event so terribly routine as this, she nonetheless felt at odds with its progression. 

Terrified that Carmen was right to be worried, Barba fell into where he was most comfortable: an argument.

“If we proceed on what we have--one wrongful death, probably--” he thought of what Fin had said about the good samaritan, and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial hum, “ _Probably two,_ maybe--” 

Barba heard at once what he was offering of himself, almost implicitly. He corrected quickly, “It can’t be me.”

Nothing changed in Carmen’s tight expression, and Barba almost began to _plead_ that she had been mistaken, that things were slow because he wasn’t there to be chosen for the task, that no one he worked with or for had genuinely suggested this was again his place. 

Breathlessly, he said, “It can’t be me” and “It’d be a sideshow” and “It _can’t.”_

“I know,” Carmen said, but continued on as if Barba had issued questions, not proclamations. “Their thinking is the public won’t wait for another internal investigation. I guess the scene was cordoned off--I haven’t seen any amatuer footage on social media--and IAB confiscated bodycam video in a heartbeat, but we can’t get a word as to whether they’ve reviewed it yet. But they’re not kidding themselves--gunshots at nine in the morning on a Tuesday?” 

“You’re telling me the DA feels impatient, but there’s no one assigned to the case?”

“Yes,” Carmen said. Then, aware of the array of officers assembled in the waiting area, she lowered her voice. “I don’t think I need to tell you why people might be hesitant to take on the NYPD.”

“No,” Barba agreed, not taking pains to similarly affect his tone. They meant to waylay him once--meant to disrupt his case and then end his life--and he’d buried them all the same. For all the terror, personal and professional upset, there had been unfettered justice. He couldn’t fathom not wanting a taste.

_“They_ should tell _me.”_

He sighed, rubbed his forehead. The headache bursting between his eyes hadn’t dulled, even for the bottle of ibuprofen his mother left in his care, standing on the armrest of the empty seat next to him, a little battlement. 

“If we proceed now--”

“We might not get a conviction,” Barba interrupted. Without Carisi, and whatever the outcome there, the case wouldn’t be a strong if the picture it painted wasn’t complete. Who took the brunt of the assault, and who was still clinging to life because he was spared? Again, Barba felt weak. He dipped forward, wanting to again drop his head into his hands, but unable to rally their movement. “This cannot possibly fall to me.”

“That’s what I told McCoy.” 

“In the hallway,” Barba repeated, suspect. 

“...at this point we were at that disgusting hot dog stand.”

“And on this little sojourn, he told you he still wants to separate the charges,” Barba said, sparing Carmen the indignity of speaking against their superior. Barba had no such qualms, himself.

She looked at Barba carefully. There was no point in trying to determine if he could weather the conversation, or if it was fair of her to impart it on him, anyway; she already knew every word of this was wrong.

“I came to clue you in and ideally… to hear from you where you think I should turn this. On your behalf, if not by your hand.” 

She knew Barba was too proud to ask for her help, but he’d want particulars in place if it was to be done anyway. 

And she’d thought to ask because nothing in her dealings with Barba gave her any indication to the contrary: that he wouldn’t want the challenge, set raw and dripping on his plate. He’d so scarcely in his career felt the need to tend to his heart before the work that they’d both had to think, and consider how he could best refuse having his hand in the process.

Carmen continued, “We should give them an answer before they formally ask you the question. I was thinking Madison or Okenaye.” 

Barba wasn’t surprised for her shrewdness. The DA’s office had shaped them both, whittingly them down to something sharp and severe.

“The guy who would take it for the publicity, or the woman who’d win it, if her every move wasn’t guided by her five-year-plan?” 

“Madison could win.”

“Madison is graceless. Sell Jack on Okenaye. She’ll accept if it comes as an order from on high.”

A curt little nod sealed the deal. Barba knew Carmen wouldn’t tug on the jacket sleeves, or raise her hand. She’d plant a word or two, careful and polished, in only the right ears. It was politics, and hers was a deft hand at the game. Barba only played coy with the obvious. Carmen could throw a winning hand, knowing it would filter back into the deck, and find her desired target.

It would be clean, Barba knew. People with faces to save could save them. All the same, he felt wrong about making plans to shirk his duties.

“I can’t--” 

“I know.”

“The timing is important,” Barba admitted, grudgingly, of whatever would become of the case. “But I’m here. I’m _staying_ here. I'm staying with him.” 

His promise--and Dom’s order before it--circled in his thoughts. What did it mean to wait when patience eluded him? He was terrified of the prospect of a purposeless moment, and did not believe himself strong enough to sit here, empty handed. He was weak, and wanted a meal for his senses. He wanted to do something with all the anger and injustice he felt, besides let it solidify in the pit of his stomach.

Barba was impossibly quiet before he broke open. But that was always how it happened.

“Or--”

He faltered just as quickly.

Carmen started to collect her things; she wouldn’t let Barba surrender himself.

“--If… all else fails,” _If the worst happens, if the consequences don’t matter, and I take this case because it will be the last I ever have of him..._ “Wait. Wait, and say as much to the media. It’s not yet certain whether any additional manslaughter charges will be added.”

The wording would, at least, pin him for the first. 

“It’s crass,” he allowed. “It’s cynical.” 

_It won't matter if he never again sees me that way._

“But you can do it.” 

He didn't rush to tell her he didn't mean it like that--in part because he knew she wouldn't take it poorly if she believed it wasn’t the case, but moreso because he suspected he was right. 

Carmen realized her true error, then. She’d meant to be sly, to court Barba into much the same behavior to stave off what she feared would seap from their office--that misplaced sense of purpose that didn’t invigorate them all, but instead turned their heads collectively to the one man who had gone down this road before, and lost a little bit of sanity for it. But still he’d _won._ It seemed practical. _Circular,_ Carmen would have argued, if anyone had asked her opinion. And _cruel._

But then, Barba’s head cocked itself just so, and the thoughts and whims of others drifted into his ear, and touched that part of him that always had something to prove. 

Carmen hadn’t meant to dig into that flayed-open wound gaining purchase over her boss’ heart. She’d wanted to protect him, but it was hard--if she took his cues, she’d throw him only nearer to more turmoil, that being the route he most often chose for himself.

She stood, and curtailed his own deliverables. 

“Do you want to be kept informed, or should I file for an indefinite leave.”

“And forge my signature?” Barba asked, knowing what the paperwork entailed for having looked at it--but not filed--a year ago.

Carmen shrugged, and Barba found he agreed. _Why not?_

“No definite answers on my part. You can’t reach me.” Barba served a look so as to dismiss the fact that, with the phone charger, she’d _made_ him accessible. 

But Barba’s true intention was this: “If Jack wants my services that badly, he can come here, and acknowledge what he’s asking.” 

Then, with words and an inflection so unlike her Barba knew at once Carmen was quoting someone else, she sighed and said, “You really have it out for yourself, don't you?” 

Carisi’s words, even. Once upon a time.

Unlike Carisi, she wasn't sincere in her criticism. She was glad Barba was this particular kind of person--righteous, brazen, a little full of himself, and imbued with power enough take part in radically confronting the justice system. 

“If ever there was a time to get it done without pushback…”

She was right to whisper, and Barba could all but read her mind for the look it put on her face.

Trying to germinate expediency because the public needed that--because a broader outlook would inevitably be torn to shreds by their political counterparts, and because the NYPD would be smart to _let this one go_ \--was every combination of uphill battle, bitter pill, and mammoth undertaking imaginable. Even if ther best outlooks became outcomes, people would have their reasons for distrusting the process. What would it say about the justice system that convictions in cop-related shootings were only won when another cop was on the receiving end? Barba could just as well make that claim himself, even if the DA’s office would collectively shit itself if he so much as _breathed_ while _thinking_ of that statement in the _vicinity_ of the press.

But there was a dead man, suspect or not, and two wounded to the point of questioning not _if_ that number would jump, but _when._ The skepticism wasn’t without merit.

Barba trusted Carmen to keep as much in mind as she set out towards that end. 

Alone again, Barba surveyed the room. He saw the distinct choice he’d made for himself in not standing amongst cops and Carisi’s squad, and not positioning himself nearer his family, gathered and crying. He was front and center, near all the foot traffic amidst doctors and nurses, poised at the very edge between certain knowledge and whipsy prayers. Before comfort and community, he wanted information and access. 

_No,_ Barba realized with a pang of guilt. That was not what he was waiting for. He _wanted_ Carisi, in every petulant, uninformed, and unmitigated way. Despite what he’d been told, some part of Barba still hoped to see him duck his head out of a room, sheepish for causing such a fuss. Maybe his arm would be in a sling, maybe he’d be sporting a bright purple bruise against his pale skin. Maybe that would be the worst of it. 

Maybe they would hug and kiss and Barba could go back to feeling embarrassed for how he’d left court, and Carisi could try not to laugh, and murmur something impossibly sweet instead. 

The situation that had him sitting in his courtroom best midday at a Manhattan hospital, cup of coffee at his feet and nothing but Carisi on his mind still felt unreal. He had heard only snippets of its truth--from Fin, in the midst of it, and from Carmen, from the outside. He’d seen glimpses of blood and the drawn expressions on people’s faces. He’d seen a mother’s tears and bore the brunt of her heartache. There were crowds of concerned faces, their numbers lending authority and consequence to the situation. 

Carisi’s shooting felt, to Barba, like a piece of tawdry fiction that had suddenly _happened._

Perhaps because he’d told himself the story so many times, Barba was remiss to catalogue the idea as fact. It had happened, but what was he to do with that? He’d never gotten so far in his thinking. The worst of it was that it could happen at all. 

A woman crossed his path and took one of the empty seats on either side of him. Barba, looking up, bit back the snide comment on his tongue.

_Where have **you** been?_

Rollins looked wrecked. Her face was pale, a combination of having scrubbed her face clean of makeup and tears and blood alike, and the heady realization her work felt unfinished. Without preamble, she recalled for Barba coming upon the scene, seeing officer Taylor standing, gun in his hand, and three bodies on the ground. Barba, even for knowing what she was speaking of, nonetheless hesitated a moment before accepting the gruesome story as Carisi’s.

Two dead, she said. Or as good as. 

One was still moving, breathing, scrambling to extricate himself from the situation. His legs kicking out, dress shoes scuffing at the gravel, Carisi failed to gain traction.

He looked wet. His mouth and face both had an unnatural sheen to them. His hands, too, but only as a result of digging into the frozen ground as he tried to sit himself up. 

Rollins was quiet for a time after speaking; it didn't feel like so grave a difference. 

“He’ll kill me for putting that in your head.”

Barba huffed what, under different circumstances, might have been a laugh. 

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I certainly hope he gets the chance.”

“I’m sorry for ducking out on you,” Rollins said. “I know how it looked.”

Barba realized he wasn’t up for accepting her apology. 

“All I’ve heard all morning was how great the surgery went, how he was going to be okay… and to see you buck the party line… I thought I was losing my touch, you know? All of a sudden, I couldn’t tell who was lying to me.” 

“I was bawlin’.” This admission, more than anything else, gave Barba pause. “After the fact, it just hit me. How scared I was. How… sick I felt, seein’ them laid out like that. Not just Carisi. All of them.” 

Her hands were twisting and tearing apart a paper towel in her lap--something Barba hadn’t noticed for focusing only on her words and the struggle playing out over her face as she tried to access them.

Awkwardly, Barba coughed and looked around. 

“Where’s Fin? He drove me here and I…” 

“He’s holding down the precinct. A Sergeant's responsibilities, and all.”

“Oh. Right.” 

Barba felt like a heel for forgetting. Carisi had been excited for Fin. There had been an impromptu party after a late night on the job that Barba--not usually one for karaoke and drinks at 11 in the morning--wasn’t able to attend. He’d seen pictures, though, and a few seconds of video before Rollins got wise to Carisi’s filming. 

“You know he’d rather be here--”

“No, I'm not--I just forgot.” Barba schooled his expression; he hadn’t meant to look annoyed for Fin’s absence. In reality, he’d felt a surge of fear for not seeing him. Had something terrible happened between the garage and the waiting room? Anything felt possible. 

“Which is awful. I really should take an interest in,” he gestured loosely with one hand. _All this._

“I don't think anyone thinks you’re lacking for interest, Counselor.”

It was another line deserving of a laugh, were Barba up to it.

“Can you tell me anymore about… how this happened.”

Rollins took a breath. It felt like so long ago, now. Last night, this morning--before her world had changed. And if she hadn’t already told him the worst of it, she might have answered _no._

There was a moment she considered it. 

She wondered, if denied, whether Barba would get very quiet or very loud. She’d seen him shout down a judge in court, his voice running away from him and climbing in pitch as the words--legal precedent, arguments, _insults_ \--came unleashed. She’d seen him seethe silently, too, but that was almost just as rare. More often than not, Barba found something devastating to say. 

The prospect died after taking its first breath towards actualization. Even if Barba struggled to put words to the sentiment, Rollins knew Carisi loved this man, and there would be not denying him.

If-- _when_ Carisi awoke and inevitably asked what had happened, Rollins would grant him the same courtesy.

“A man broke into our victim’s apartment,” she began. “Through the fire escape. He entered her bedroom and proceeded to assault her while she slept.” 

Barba grimaced and moved to duck his head. He was ashamed--he hadn’t once thought of the victim whose assault had required Carisi’s presence at the scene. 

Rollins continued, “She woke up, started screaming--he began to choke her. A neighbor heard, called 911 and then went to knock on the girl’s apartment door. Perp threw open the door, practically ran over the neighbor, and split. Uniforms had already been dispatched and had the doors covered. He didn't get out.” Rollins took a breath between telling of one crime and the next. 

“That's when we got called in. We thought we'd play it quiet, not excite this guy any. The girl was able to call and give us more to go on--a description, things he was saying to her. She said the guy seemed unstable, on drugs maybe. We figured he was spooked, and might to to get out like he came in, through someone's apartment. We called the tenants, told them to keep their doors locked and barricaded. We waited as long as we could for him to make a move before we went in.” 

She said that like an apology, and by the look on Barba’s face, Rollins knew it went unaccepted.

“And from then--I dunno. Shit went sideways. Best guess is a resident caught the guy trying to open his door and rushed him. Perp plowed over two unis, the resident in pursuit. They ran out towards the exit Carisi was covering and…” 

Then rest, Barba didn't want to hear again. 

“Don't quote me on this Counselor, but this is what we call a bad fuckin’ shoot.” 

“I'm shocked there's a term for it at all.”

_There,_ Rollins thought as the last of the sentiment flicked off Barba’s tongue. The devastating response she was expecting did not disappoint. 

“On second thought, you can quote me.”

Barba razed a hand through his hair; not a strand was spared. He smoothed it down, after, like he’d known all along the gesture wouldn't do anything for his nerves.

“Say it yourself on the stand.”

“I will,” Rollins said, quietly but with no less force than the promise deserved. “To anyone who asks.”

Unexpectedly, her response gave Barba pause. He drew his arms up to fold them across his chest, further rumpling his jacket and shirt. At first blush, Rollins might have made him for cold--but the embrace was too tight, and not meant to comfort. 

“The DA may separate the charges.”

“The _fuck?”_

Barba sighed, aggrieved as if Rollins had made the statement, not him.

“I don’t know entirely what they’re thinking, and I haven’t had my say,” Barba pointed out, the implication being, having his say could _change_ their thinking.

“But no one is jumping at the bit for this case. And I got it done, last time--”

“With a pretty major caveat, Counselor.” He’d very nearly died, his life held tenuously between his writing a forced suicide note and the actions of those silently watching from the hallway. By the end--with the crack and explosion of a flashbomb to disrupt the proceedings--Rollins wouldn't have been surprised if Barba was taken out from under them, felled if not by a bullet, then a heart attack. 

Carisi, who had been crouched beside her, his heart pounding out of his chest, gave her the idea.

Words failed her, leaving Rollins only to shake her head dumbly. 

“You shouldn’t even be considered. Carisi’s all over it this case. Literally.”

“And he’s the strongest feature,” Barba said, the notion weak and crumbling in his mouth. He couldn't spit it out even for wanting to. “If he lives.”

“No judge would allow it,” Rollins said, speaking as if Barba hadn’t put that notion into the world, hadn’t made her hear it and think it and see its reason, shrewd as it was. 

She realized it wasn't as though Barba didn’t already know that, or suspect it, or in turn care very deeply about the reasons bolstering courthouse norms. More than helpless, he was entirely lost for Carisi’s condition, floundering such that he wouldn't reject someone telling him what to do. Point him in a direction--even in the barest of empty deserts, where every view promised only a horizon--and in this moment, Barba would start walking.

“They can’t ask that of you,” Rollins said. She knew she couldn’t change the way the winds were blowing, but she hoped to turn Barba that much to put those winds at his back. “They can’t ask you to take the worst half of this case, and pretend Carisi doesn’t color all of it.” 

“Nothing’s decided.”

“Yes, it is. _You_ decide.”

Barba nodded weakly, though they both knew it wasn’t so simple. 

Rollins wanted to tell him about the ambulance ride in. More than inform, she wanted to expel the awful scene she alone had been witness to: Carisi’s eyes, roving and blinking and rolling around, like they’d been knocked loose, under eyelids that seemed to have come unhinged. The way he parted his lips to speak, but said nothing, and in turn looked all the more fish-like. How, before he lost consciousness, his arm thumped against hers not in an attempt to reach her, but someone just behind his grasp. The way his lolling head felt so inconceivably _heavy_ when Rollins was instructed by the EMT to hold it steady.

Like a baby’s.

And she’d thought, _Christ,_ hadn’t he taught her that? 

The imagery gripped her too-hard, and Rollins decided she couldn't sit by Barba’s side for seeing those things, but couldn't tell him if she meant to keep a shred of composure. 

She stood abruptly and began to gather her things. Barba didn’t seem surprised for her sudden departure; he’d fielded enough in the past several hours. If he couldn’t time a person’s breaking point by now, he’d be just as well to give up the game.

“When you see him,” she said, her voice growing thick as her face warmed over. She felt like she was cooking under the pale fluorescent lighting, like the sticky-sweet creations out from her and Kim’s childhood Easy Bake Oven. “Don’t tell him I left.”

_So long as Fin doesn’t tell him I nearly didn’t,_ Barba thought, though to Rollins he only conceded an near-imperceptible nod.

“I just--I need to see Jesse right now. I need to hug my kid.” 

She sounded conflicted. It shouldn't have taken much for Barba to do the kind thing, to ease her conscience, to say, “I think he’d understand.” But still, he felt miles away from the thing, and Rollins was quick--he knew, he’d chased after her before. 

Barba nearly didn’t get it out in time, much less add, “You should--if you can--speak to his parents before you go.” 

His gaze tracked his cause and he repeated, “If you can.”

“I will,” Rollins said, another promise made on Carisi’s behalf. She looked over her shoulder where Barba had indicated, then back at Barba. Her expression didn’t change, didn’t become more withdrawn at the prospect, and while Barba supposed she had ample practice talking to families in such stressful, tenuous moments, he also had the sneaking suspicion she’d been more hesitant to speak with _him._

“You oughta be sittin’ with them.” 

Barba didn’t so much as blink. Whatever would have been untoward or out of place was, now, well within the realm of possibility. There were no rules.

“None of us should be here at all.” 

“Whatever went down, I can promise you it’s not what’s on their minds.” 

Rollins left, and Barba didn’t watch her go. He could hear from across the room the renewed chatter. Things had died down since Carisi’s sisters arrived, shouting. 

Barba sank his head into his hands, palms pressed hard against his eyes. The pressure mounted, and soon was exploding the stars fixed into the blackness he’d sought. He indulged in the destruction for longer than was good for him, and when he drew back, blinking, he was undisturbed by the wreckage set by his own thoughts. 

He shouldn’t let himself mourn prematurely. _He knew that._ But his petulant streak wanted to hear it from Carisi, who would ground the soft admonishment in care and understanding. 

_You think you mean to protect yourself._

_But it won’t hurt any less._

They’d demonstrated as much in the past few weeks. 

When Barba stood, he didn’t take stock of how deeply his legs ached. Nor when he walked, he didn’t notice the stiffness dissipate into an unnatural buzz, as if he’d engulfed his lower half in a vat of fizzy soda. It was these absurdist thoughts--and not the hurt, doubt, and heartache he felt crystallizing throughout his chest and down his extremities--that carried him into the midst of the Carisi family, and into a seat in their company. 

The ache returned to his legs--rushing and enveloping him, as if he’d sat himself down in the ocean at high tide.

His gaze found those of Kitty and Dom. Dom was slumped in a corner chair, his height more dependent on the wall at his back for support. Kitty was pitched into his side, her head on his chest, their hands meeting over his stomach. They looked exhausted. 

Barba imagined they were looking at him like prey animals might regard a predator in some insufferable sahara heat. They'd gathered together out of mutually recognized necessity, even so far as to push their instincts into the backs of their minds. Neither was going to make a move.

Barba didn't feel especially fearsome, but the wary look in Kitty's eyes told him otherwise. She had chosen his designation in the scene, and to fight against it would only make the vision in her mind all the more exacting and dark. 

Gina was on her phone, thumbing, then deleting, walls of text. Theresa had her gaze pinned to a muted television screen hoisted up near the spackled ceiling. It was showing an infomercial, something she might have sneered at if she had really been paying attention. But her eyes were hard, her thoughts tucked so protectively inward, she might as well have been bracing for impact. 

Between Gina and Dom was Bella, twisted sideways--and in her entirety--in her seat, salt-stained boots grinding against the armrest, and her long arms drawn about her bent knees. Barba thought they looked choreographed, and wondered if they’d stationed themselves in this way before, decades ago, when the ruthless bullying Carisi endured took him well beyond the school nurse’s office. His gaze returning again to Dom and Kitty, Barba supposed if there were vigils such as these that happened later, they’d have been kept under wraps. 

The sisters--for as much as Carisi spoke of them--were still well beyond Barba’s comprehension here, existing as a unit. Bella’s fingers grazed her sister Gina’s sweater at the shoulder, like she itched to find a thread and pull. Gina’s impractical knee-high boots with a considerable heel were spotless, as if she’d never taken one step onto the City streets, except where Theresa thudded the toe of her own book into the heel’s side, scuffing the suede. These were instances of friendly fire, and readily accepted among their ranks. 

Yet Barba--who hadn’t done anything to rival the idle destruction of suede--was treated as the enemy combatant. 

At least, such was his appointment in their church or their home, on their _turf._ Here, out in the world but confined by its horrors, none had noticed him. He was just another tired form, hunched and wrinkled, settling in for a terrible wait. 

In this light, they weren’t matriarchs-in-waiting, but fellow New Yorkers. Barba--for as much as he could imagine the subway, now--pictured himself in silent confinement with them, hurtling fast under the City. 

Inexplicably, Barba felt himself relax. 

Over the course of the day, the crowds in the waiting room had slowly dissipated. Officers who had been on the scene took their leave, either for being called elsewhere or figuring they were waiting for a poor outcome. A number of officers from other precincts--indeed, other burroughs--arrived, having heard their one-time-new-guy had been injured on the job. There was a lot of catching up to do for those who’d last known Carisi as a Staten Island beat cop.

_He made detective?_

_He lost the mustache?_

_He’s gay?_

But they came and went as quickly as Carisi had, in their departments. The sisters were a constant, however, and their quiet reverence couldn’t overcome their true natures for long. 

Barba felt his head droop. He was of a mind to check the time, or peer out the windows, but knowing how long he’d waited did little to tell him how much longer still he had to go, so he decided better of it. 

He’d never imagine he’d willfully _choose_ ignorance, but there it was.

He stared straight ahead again. Bella’s long hair guarded her face, and it was only when she drew it back behind her ear that she caught sight of Barba, a silent partner to their miserable party.

She all but kicked her legs out, nearly catching Gina in her considerably swing. In an instant, Bella was out of her chair and pulling a surprised Barba out of _his_ and into a strong-armed hug.

_“Jesus,”_ she hissed, quiet enough that her mother wouldn’t hear and berrate her for blasphemy. “About time, you _asshole.”_

Barba may have been slow to complete the embrace, but his defense was already coiled, ready to spring from his tongue. 

“I’ve been right over there--”

“I _know.”_

The embrace fell apart, but Bella kept close. She smoothed a hand over Barba’s jacket lapel, like she’d upturned it, and took the opportunity to admire Barba’s dark blue tie and its tiny pattern of five-petaled white flowers. 

“This is nice,” she said, her tone slipping towards dreamlike. “Sonny pick it out?” 

It was a joke that nearly tore Barba in two. 

He sat down, first, with one arm thrown back to grip his chair’s armrest. He didn’t carry himself like a man confident he’d get to the two feet he was going. 

Bella joined him. She was infinitely more graceful in the act, like she didn’t half expect the world to slip out from under her when she wasn't looking, and send her careening into the abyss. 

Her eyes were soft, even if her voice couldn't quite reorchestrate itself to match. She and her brother had that in common, where their natural inflections made half their tender words seem argumentative. 

_Oh,_ Barba remembered saying to Carisi, maybe in bed, maybe over coffee, maybe on the crowded sidewalks of their city--he couldn't commit to a location. They all felt right. He was only certain that he wore a smirk to Carisi’s sweet smile, and that his hands had been free to make obnoxious air quotes. 

_You “love” me, do you?_

“He's going to be okay, you know.”

She said that with all the confidence and security afforded to her by her blonde hair, fair skin, extended family, and unbreakable faith. Barba wanted none of what she had, specifically, just the outcome it all culminated to produce. 

So he nodded, said nothing to the contrary, and tried not to think of what he’d told Rollins about being lied to. 

-

Barba was half asleep when he heard it--a mother’s wail. 

His attention found Kitty, first, then followed her line of sight across the room where a family of four were being torn asunder. It was like a dance they’d synchronized for such an occasion: a woman screamed, a man stumbled. A little boy sat alone in a plastic chair, his feet too short to meet the ground.

Benson was on her feet and advancing towards the family in an instant, which was when Barba knew what he had suspected: they were the family of the good samaritan.

They’d been waiting for news, shunted off in a corner, either explicitly or implicitly due to the large police presence. He’d noticed them earlier, in particular the young son, who turned his big, watchful eyes around the room. If Fin had the story straight, Barba thought they could have expected the company of Dodds, who, in lieu of the Commissioner, could spare a few words of thanks to the would-be hero’s family.

But, because of who had felled the hero, there was no such meeting.

Barba never saw the family of the suspect, and supposed they only ever went to the morgue.

He didn’t want to play games with the odds. Two other men died--why should the third be spared? But still, he recalled that gruesome detail from Fin, about the fanning out of the shots, and couldn’t help it. He _was_ hopeful. 

He watched, but couldn’t hear, what Benson said to the family: Howell Roberts, his wife Tracie, and their youngest son James. All he heard in time was their responses, loud for no longer feeling as though their good behavior would grant them anything. They’d given up that game and were shouting at her, wanting answers, wanting a truth that was useless to them now--that this was an accident, that the officers gathered were’t there because their son shot first or anything of the sort, that they were here for yet another victim. 

Numb, Barba left his seat and made to join them. 

He felt pity for these people, and a kind of imagined kinship that filled him fully with a new wave of terror. He did not wish to know the pain of losing a family member in this fashion--a violent departure of a life, and despite that, only tired bureaucracy to answer for it. Or worse, silence. 

Speaking to them was another decision made absent any consideration. Barba was simply moving towards them, and when his intent became clear that was that.

“I’m ADA Rafael Barba,” he said, and they blinked at him, their yelling sated only as a result of their confusion. He suddenly felt disoriented, having left the company of one grieving family for another, his words and being again having no purchase in their hearts and minds. 

Quietly, and as if on autopilot, he said, “Until such time that a criminal investigation requires a response on behalf of the City, and a representative reaches out to you, I suggest you speak with someone who can guide you through this process.” 

Barba had never strung together a more empty set of words. He couldn’t be sure he wasn’t repeating some brush-off he’d heard decades ago--the week in June of 1981 when his mother’s landlord had changed the locks on their apartment came to mind. It was retaliation for some windows his father had broken, and at the time Barba didn’t see the great injustice that left his mother red in the face. He was too thrilled at the prospect of a week of sleepovers at Alex’s place. 

He opened his mouth again, but closed it to the thought of preparing these people for a potential legal battle with the NYPD. And despite knowing what he did, Barba also knew it was best not to make promises--let alone to a side--on behalf of his superiors in the District Attorney’s office, prior to being given the official word. What he needed, then, was someone with empathy and patience, someone who would hold these peoples’ hands until such a time as Barba could collect them, unscathed by any inflated ideas about justice. 

Unfortunately, his frayed nerves came up with only one name, and she was _none_ of those things. 

“Rita Calhoun,” he said, and gave her number, “She can help you figure out where to go from here--”

“She’s a defense attorney,” Tracie said, her eyes on the phone her young son James had passed to her, which he’d used to google the name. The little boy turned his eyes on Barba, like he had towards most of the rest of the room: with rightful suspicion. 

Howell--now without a namesake in his oldest son--turned fast on Barba, putting a finger square in his chest. 

“No, see, what happened here was a crime, carried out by the state, against my son. He is the victim here so no, we don’t need a defense attorney. We need a prosecutor. That’s you, and you’re here, so don’t pass me off to someone else’s voicemail.”

Barba took a step forward; Howell could relent or break his own finger. In that moment, Barba didn’t care which. 

“You're right. This case needs a prosecutor. But that isn't me.”

Only after he said it did he hear the uselessness of the statement, which Howell echoed, throwing his arms up, his head back, and looking for a God he’d doubted for a lifetime. 

_“Then why the fuck are you here!”_

Silence flooded the room. It swept in on the turned heads of police officers and hospital staff alike. Barba felt their eyes on his back like hot stage lights, and though he’d always been something of a showman, he was absent even the smallest inclination to perform for these people.

“There was another man wounded in the shooting,” Barba said, a fact he felt more inclined to scream in frustration, but was struggling now to keep calm and, for appearance’s sake, diplomatic. He didn’t know why he bothered. 

He didn’t feel either of those things.

“He’s my partner. He’s a detective.”

Tracie--perhaps overcome with sympathy for this man she’d just met, or else at a loss as she tried to comprehend the devastation wrought in the world by a single man with a gun--broke into another string of quiet sobs. She turned away and found the open arms of her child, dry-eyed and stern for coming up in a world where depravity did not come as a shock. 

For wading through this constant stream of hurt, Howell arrived at a different conclusion.

“Maybe this killer cop won’t get away with it, then, is what you’re saying.”

_Without a doubt,_ Barba thought, but bit his tongue. He steeled himself from all the things he wanted to say, namely the open threats he wanted to turn and lob at the officers gathered. He focused on this family, smaller now than it had been that morning. 

“Call that number.” 

Then, with the father’s cold sentiments echoing in his head, Barba swallowed down the lump in his throat and spoke over its swelling mass and added: “And give me yours. We may be on the same side of this, yet.” 

That much, the couple was able to take to heart, and Barba knew why: he sounded ruined. His voice was thinned by the ache in his heart, and given to breaks as it stretched over a well of unshed tears. There wasn’t news yet to have him be seen crying, but the longer he went without an answer, the closer he felt to that inevitability. 

The displaced feeling ran fresh over his body, leaving its mark in a cold sweat that blossomed uncomfortably at his throat. It would rise like swamp waters unless he loosened his shirt and tie, a thing he was remiss to do. 

_Don’t get comfortable,_ he’d told himself since arriving the previous morning. _Don’t be stupid._

He knew Benson’s eyes were on him. She didn’t have words for men with expectations of ruin. She could show contrition, certainly, and pity and pain and anger on their behalf. But words--and in turn explanations, conclusions, decisions--failed her.

She spared a few parting sentiments with the family and then took Barba by the arm and walked him away.

Instead of returning to their jacket-laden seats, she took him around a corner, stopping near a set of vending machines. Unnatural blue light fed into the shadowed space, expanding it. Barba wanted to sink his head into the oddly calming hum of the soda machine, to bask in its eerie glow and be transported to some other place. _Anywhere,_ he thought, _anywhere but here._

His arms suddenly felt itchy under his shirt sleeves, and scratching them gave him something to do with all the nervous energy he had now in reserve. 

“What,” he said, sounding painfully weak though he strived for attitude. “Did you think I was about to lose it? Is that why you’ve spirited me away? Am I unfit for--”

“Rafael. Can I just--?”

She touched him--a hand to his cheek, like she could keep his expression from falling any further.

It wasn’t enough. Barba felt his face contort to a single point, pitched at the ground. He heard the shuddering breath that tore through his chest and he instinctively bent forward and turned slightly, meaning to hide his pain. Barba drew on lessons from his childhood: people could guess he was hurting, but if they couldn’t _see..._

Benson embraced him in a way that was wholly unlike before, where they’d practically rushed one another, hungry for contact. Here, she arranged herself to best engulf him in her arms, not fixing around him to ensure the same. Her goal was simple: hold her friend. Keep him from falling apart. 

Neither spoke. Barba tried, once, but the word-- _Liv_ \--got lost in the curl of her hair. When he was finally able to find strength enough in his arms to unfurl them, they only drew around the backs of Benson’s so that she was holding him, and he was holding on. 

His body was rife with contradictions: his legs felt weak, his shoulders tight, his brow heavy and his gaze short. He imagined tasting at the back of his mouth his own stomach, for as much as it felt to be scaling the height and length of his esophagus. It got a foothold in the chambers of his heart and pushed the thing down so as to gain still more height. Barba felt a persistent pressure at the backs of his eyes, blinding him for the absence of his partner. Guilt rose from the sole of his feet to fill what had been abandoned, quickly taking its place as the frontrunner in the race to choke off Barba’s heart from all angles.

Benson was all that existed between Barba and a hard crash onto the linoleum floor. If he breathed now, it was because she let him. 

He begged a few words, but nothing whole. 

“What do I…”

“How…”

She was glad when he didn’t ask entire questions; she didn’t have any answers. 

All the same, she could only repeat, “I know. I know.”

She loosened his tie for him, held his face in her hands much in the way she would for Noah, when his big eyes filled with tears after a scraped knee momentarily took him out of commission. If the situations were at all compatible, she'd have looked into Barba’s eyes with more certitude than either felt, and yet convince him this was but a minor setback, and yet, it hurt _now,_ but it wasn’t the end of the world, he’d be okay, wouldn’t he? 

She couldn’t achieve that with Barba. Their gazes met and quickly faltered. Barba supposed it was entirely his doing, because if he saw hers fill with tears, if for the hour and the wait and the silence she gave up hope, he knew he was a goner.

By the time they returned to the waiting area, the Roberts family had gone. 

They sat in the nearest seats, Barba feeling like an invalid for Benson’s looped hold of his arm. He was in a better position now to watch the Carisi family pray and talk quietly amongst themselves--the latter not being a thing Barba would have guessed was in their wheelhouse. They were all blonde heads bent together, Kitty’s darker crown almost invisible in the seat of light. He wanted to tell them there was a chapel in the hospital, and cutting into that thought was another: he only knew that because this was the hospital where his father had died. Some stories up and facing west, he remembered. And though he knew where the chapel was he couldn’t have described it, because he’d never set foot on its carpeted floors. He’d only stood beside its doors, waiting for his mother to finish her prayers. 

He’d looked skyward, his view impeded by ceiling tiles, and said on one occasion after Lucia had spoken with her saints and her God, making promises and issuing pleas, _None from me, thanks._

She’d gone right back in and loudly prayed for her heartless son’s soul. 

Barba took stock of the presentation he’d make if he did indeed go to these people and imply that their prayers might feel more at home in a dark room with crushed red velvet seat covers. His suit was wrinkled. He smelled stale. He was starving and sick at the thought of eating all at once.

Ultimately, he couldn’t decide, so he said nothing to no one, which he supposed was as much a choice as anything. Change was a process, and dissent was a part. 

Barba didn’t need to hypothesize Carisi’s response--he knew he’d be disappointed for Barba’s hesitance, exasperated by his _neither here nor there_ reasoning. Carisi was one of the few moral questions Barba sometimes felt he had all the answers to. In bed, he knew how to touch and love this man, to render his smart mouth slackened and soft. He knew how to spill breath into his form and steal it away just as fast. 

Barba knew how to hurt him, and heal him, in every way and for every conceivable means. 

Barba stared at his hands, empty in his lap, and thought about them being that way for the rest of his natural life. They were heavy and lined with thick veins, appearing as though they could exist absent the rest of his body. He turned them other to cage each of his knees and sighed, wondering if the silence was driving him slowly crazy, or if madness would be welcome now, over despair. 

The fear, the not-knowing, the doubt, and the ready cynicism he fought not to reach him as expectation, all arrived to undress him, one stitch at a time. What had happened to Carisi--what was happening still--rendered Barba _stripped,_ specifically. Stripped, in perpetuity. 

Stripped, long before naked.

The act was somehow more humiliating than the consequence.

It was worse than taking that strange, refracted seat in court, where he spoke aloud and on the record while angled at varying degrees, reaching crowds of jurors, opponents, and spectators alike. Worse, even, than the situation that had put him there. Worse than being sat at his kitchen table, accepting the torment of two cops and simultaneously being watched by a dozen others. 

Barba, who had once loved walking into a room seconds behind the reputation that preceded him, had briefly lost both his reputation and the body that could not but strut, impeccably styled to meet it. 

He’d once willfully walked himself--sharp suit, spectacular tie, and daring smirk--into a physical recreation of that menace. Barba hadn’t had cause to be frightened, then. The raw fear that had instinctively rushed his senses was quickly spent, speaking in service to the victim. 

_You liked it like that. She didn’t._

Carisi didn't know him then, but that was how he’d come to know Barba best.

It was how he’d first come to love Barba, too, the conclusion ripe for surfacing up from under the hero-worship and suit envy.

The transfer of emotions seemed to have worked seamlessly for Carisi. Meanwhile, Barba had nothing as profound to couple with what he now felt, and the discord was staggering. It was only right, then, that he was naked in his hurt and his fear, while the love he bore kept him from exhibiting what the waking world could see only as shame. 

Only, it wasn’t a comfort.

The love should have kept him warm, made him presentable. Instead it was another hand at his throat, threatening to crush him. It steeled and straightened his shoulders, but only in existing as a rod along his spine. Love put his hands into fists as he sought to protect it. Love salted over his tongue, consuming the last dregs of his humanity.

Love was just grief in its earliest form. 

Barba held it in his eyes, blinking it back and back and back until it was all that he was inside. There didn’t feel to be room for a breath of air or a single wisp of hope. 

Fear did not undo him in this way--rather, this was the smooth hand of desperation at work. He lacked agency, here. His expertise, presence, and voice--they added nothing, they answered for _nothing._

_Is this what it felt like?_ Barba wondered. Not being st at his kitchen table in his old apartment, a gun pressed to his head, lies forced into his mouth by his own hand, but just outside the door. Just waiting, and just waiting, and realizing there was so much _love_ he had yet to access. All that wasted potential. 

Carisi had been helpless then, and so Barba was so now. 

Lives hung in the balance--Carisi’s, but Barba’s too--and again, the onus of survival was ever on Carisi.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELL SHIT YOU GUYS. So I got to see The Waves last month, and meet a tumblr pal, and go hiking, and it was the best experience I’ve had in a long, long time. 
> 
> And then I went back to reality. :'(
> 
> Besides my self-indulgent whining, thanks for sticking with it, those who've made it this far. Y'all are the real MVPs.

There was so much thinking of Carisi, yet so little of him around.

It verged on rude, his reluctance to make an appearance.

Barba had a moment--coming on nine at night, or perhaps just before, he wasn’t sure--where everything came loose. It wasn’t a breakdown so much as an unravelling. 

_Give it a few more hours,_ he thought, and he could go either way. 

It was a matter of gripping himself too tight, while simultaneously holding the whole of himself apart from others who felt much the same as he did. He sat in their presence, but was yet to breach that line that constituted their _company._ For hours he’d been there, holding his own hands, digits knotted and squeezed tight enough to bruise, not a word passing between any of them save for Bella’s early, unguarded welcome. 

(Barba wasn’t a hand-wringer. He was an anxious fidgeter, eater, talker, and scribbler, and he did not abuse his hands if he could arm them with a task.)

He knew he’d done himself a disservice: he was implicated by his own anger and fear. His place was questioned by even an idle glance about the room, where his face stood out amidst cops and family. Hospital staff clocked him for a stranger, Carisi’s family couldn’t be concerned with his presence now, if never before. And the officers--who knew him by his reputation as a blowhard and a hardass--marginalized his access to the kind of insight they might have had, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and making _the thin blue line_ into performance art. 

It took him more time to come to terms with his isolation than he’d have expected, given a lifetime of practice.

Instead of unknown nurses and doctors, or the backs of officers, Barba watched Carisi’s family, though they were infinitely more anxiety-inducing. He watched Kitty’s lip start to quiver and wondered what horrible outcome had unfurled itself, waking like a sleeping bear in her mind. He saw Dom’s hand reflexively squeeze her shoulder. The touch drew her back and she looked at him for assurances neither quite believed themselves, but believed wholeheartedly for the other. 

He saw the sisters squirm and sigh and exchange feather-soft touches across the backs of one another’s hands. Even for wanting to think so--to sooth his own bruised ego--Barba knew this wasn’t their first attempt at silent communication. That they were indeed capable of it.

No, he supposed they’d always had that skill, but relegated it to times of utmost necessity. 

The five of them each had two hands to offer, should they need to jump to the emotional aid of another. 

Barba tried not to wonder if they’d extend him the same courtesy. He rallied against it, in fact, telling himself if he wanted anything of the sort, he wouldn’t have asked his own mother to leave. 

He supposed he was most curious in the outcome: if he tipped, would he fall, still whole for as long as that lasted, and at least leave a fully assembled form, nevermind what life may or may not still rattle under his suit?

Would that at least be more presentable than coming apart slowly, seeping between the fingers on some outstretched hand? 

Would he rather die whole, or live in pieces? 

Benson, who again found that open place at Barba’s side and filled it, would not entertain such thinking, let alone allow that choice. She undid his knotted hands, poised as they were around some invisible chalice into which he bid his prayers before pouring them out, because--arrogant or fearful or hopeless--he couldn’t summon a god to which he might make the offering. 

With her hand snaking into the crook of his arm and resting there, Benson braced Barba against his worst impulses. 

For her sake, Barba tried. But his thoughts didn’t stray far.

He concerned himself again with the Roberts family. He thought of the father’s outrage, the mother’s despair, and their quiet departure. Everything in them had ruptured, and they left as emptied husks. He thought about how his own fading composure stole Benson away from them, leaving the family to gather themselves up amid a crowd of uniformed officers, and take unsure steps towards a peaceable leave. 

Barba thought about how he remembered now, bits of conversation as his own thoughts swam listlessly in circles, that most of the talk around him had been of the suspect. From not-so-privately-kept whispers, Barba learned of possible warrants for his arrest all along the coast, as far south as Savannah, Georgia. A serial rapist, they said, known to multiple police departments for being violent and evasive. All of this to pad their egos and bolster the thinking that they’d carried out justice, if not the law. 

Better still, they’d restored order--nevermind how it was exacted. 

Barba wished now he’d objected then. He wished he’d said something about how the man should be awaiting trial, not lying flayed on a slab, awaiting an autopsy, the results of which were already and _wildly_ foregone. 

But he hadn’t said anything, and worse--hadn’t brought to bear what was being dutifully ignored: the other life lost. If pressed, Barba didn’t doubt any one of them would admit the death of bystander Howell Roberts-- _Jr._ Barba realized--was unfortunate, even tragic, but they would never stipulate to having made a mistake. Instead of accepting the modicum of rightful blame, they would shift their stance, posture and wail, whatever worked in the moment. 

In just talking to the Roberts family, Barba had aligned himself with their cause. In terms of survival instincts, Barba wasn’t sure he and Carisi had all that many between them. None to spare, certainly. 

-

Many of the gathered officers had taken their leave. Barba witnessed a trend: each departing uniform would turn to the one beside him and ask to be kept updated. This carried down a wandering chain until the links dwindled. There was still more than a few handfuls, and Barba couldn’t gage which cared for Carisi and which concerned himself with the outcome as it pertained to Officer Taylor. 

Barba stood up, and though he couldn’t decide in the moment whether he wanted to wash his face or get a cup of coffee, he supposed he’d figure it out on the way. 

Coffee was his greatest driving instinct, he learned, as he passed the men’s room. 

Someone followed him. Footsteps came rushed, then slowed to match his own. Even for everything clouding his thoughts, a path was cleared for a possible threat to leap from the back of his mind to the forefront, throbbing incessantly just above his right eye. 

His own steps falling flat and hollow, his body propelling forward by sheer force of will because his heart had seemingly slowed between beats, Barba listened. 

There was swift determination informing the stranger’s gait, then caution, then determination again. Barba knew at once this was a messenger of sympathy--someone who had been itching to say something, but unwilling to make a spectacle of himself. Barba heard as much in the breathing patterns of his most troubled witnesses, there wasn’t a change he couldn’t figure the familiar song from footsteps, either. 

All the same, Barba was already drawing marks against this man who wouldn’t openly speak up for a cop if it implied speaking against another. 

Barba turned sharply when the approach he was expecting came not as an inquisitive word, but a hand on his shoulder. 

There were two things Barba knew: the man was a cop, and Barba didn’t know him. Each fact buttressed the other to offer a third--Barba couldn’t trust him.

Truthfully, he didn’t know many cops, but he could name the faces of those he’d encountered even tangentially in the courthouse, or around the precinct. He did this casually from the beginning of his career, but made a strict practice of it when the threats--and his suspicions of their origins--began. 

No, he realized. This face was a new one. 

And Barba must have worn the question on his face, because the man said at once: “You don’t know me--I’m Rick--but I’m a friend of Sonny’s.”

A veritable one, Barba concluded, to use his self-professed nickname. 

“And I spoke with his family, but, uh, I know who you are, too.”

The man looked very genuinely sorry, a thing to which Barba squared his shoulders in response. 

“And you thought the best place to offer your sympathy to me was well away from your fellow officers.”

Rick didn’t bow out then and there, but he raised his eyebrows and wet his lips, as if he’d been warned in advance not to expect an easy exchange with Rafael Barba. 

“We used to be partners, couple of months in Queens. Years back.” 

Barba had never really thought to ask Carisi about his old partners, always assuming they could be clumped together with other departments as a whole, and Carisi had left each of his other postings in a hurry. It gave Barba idea enough how he felt about them. 

Rick continued, “I guess we reconnected recently. Uh. Through GOAL.” 

Barba felt like each bit of information came as a clap of lightning, a burst of thunder, and here was the deluge: that Carisi was a known entity here, too. He wasn’t just another uniform all the others were crowding around for the take of solidarity. Some saw him fully, and chose to stand for a friend, not a fellow officer. Barba studied what kind of man Carisi had been partner to, years ago, and then made a friend of, years later.

Rick was older than Carisi but not by much--meaning Carisi was stuck with another rookie, and neither of them made much headway in the department. He was that kind of handsome largely reserved for morning news anchors, with broad shoulders and a penchant for gaining weight only around his middle if he let his gym membership go to waste.

Barba tried to picture him all those years ago, and wondered if either he or Carisi knew the ally they had riding next to them in the squad car, or if it was more expedient to purposefully and publicly revile being partnered with _the queer._

Even for choosing his moment and orchestrating it separate from those who might know and judge him, Rick had kind eyes. And Barba had made enough enemies for one day.

“So you… went bowling?”

Rick’s demeanor changed entirely. His shoulders fell from where nervousness had them up by his ears. His whole body went slack, and from his loosened frown came a small, wistful smile. 

“Oh, man, Sonny’s the worst. His center of gravity is, like, up in his elbows.” 

He laughed gently over a memory Barba didn’t share. 

“He talks about you a lot,” Rick offered. A twinge of sadness made Barba wonder briefly what had been said, but he glomed on to what was given away: Carisi had people he spoke with, and maybe complained to about Barba on occasion. He had friends who he met up and participated in goofy activities with for the hell of it. He had gone in search of his people, and found someone he’d known longer than he’d known himself, in a sense. 

Barba stuck out his hand. 

“It’s good to meet you, Rick.”

Nothing else came of their meeting. Barba heard a sound--someone shouting--and misattributed it to the waiting room and its inhabitants, all of whom were a ways well back from the disturbance. All the same, Barba felt prompted not to stray, and he returned to his seat, his face unwashed, his hand absent a warm grip around bad coffee. 

He did not see Rick again. He might as well have been a ghostly apparition for as little as Barba could make of their introduction. 

Carisi had friends, had a life when Barba wasn’t around to share it. 

The column of reasons Barba had amassed for Carisi deserving to pull through had long gotten out of hand, and Barba didn’t feel any more foolish for adding that to the list. 

He didn’t feel much at all. 

-

Gina was the first to see it. She stood to attention, covered her mouth, and sat back down. 

Insight’s tiny seed proved a slow germination, but soon everyone craned their necks to see, and squinted their eyes to read, the silent captioning of a late-night local news station peddling the same bare facts they had clung so desperately to all day. To see such tightly-held information jockeyed around in the mouths of second-tier anchors was more disoriented than anyone would have said, had they imagined it beforehand. 

Because the text came in staggered bursts, they were treated first to visions of the two men who had lost their lives. Little was said of them or for them, and Barba noticed they had inverted the junior Roberts’ name, disposing of his unique first name by some nefarious accident and instead calling him Robert Howell. 

The focus shifted back to Carisi, the survivor.

They had details enough--his position as a Detective at Manhattan SVU, his Staten Island roots, his license to practice law. Then came the more personal mentions of his large Italian-American family, his love of baseball, the Catholic faith he practiced. Barba knew one of Carisi’s last ex-girlfriends worked in print media, but was angling for television news. He wondered uselessly if this was her, making her way. 

Photos appeared to coincide with the text--nothing beyond a quick google search. There was his photo as a graduate from the academy, this vision of youthful determination practicing a sternness that was never really him. There was a group shot featuring the entire squad when Vice President Biden had graced their squadroom for a press conference. Later, Carisi had giddily told Barba of the event that Biden called him “champ,” and Barba held his tongue on the fact that Biden called everyone that, and Carisi was now part of a club that included the man’s own dog.

(Barba withheld this, lest he be forced to admit he followed both the former VP _and_ Champ the dog on Twitter. Carisi would undoubtedly demand to know the handle to Barba’s dummy account--a thing Barba only planned to admit posthumously.)

The glowingly proud Biden photo faded out into _the_ photo. _Their_ photo. 

Everything inside of Barba was silenced. 

The last breath he took was the one he held now, gripped him entirely, and bloomed in him like a latent grenade. In an instant, he was consumed. 

Carisi was smiling wide, his face pitched comfortably close to Barba’s, similarly bright faces crouched in alongside them. Though a tight, cropped shot, evidence of the beautiful day slept crookedly over smiles, sang through half-buttoned shirts, and reflected back in squinted eyes. 

It was an inexplicably awful feeling that struck Barba between the ribs and thrust upwards to cut open his heart from below. The contents spilled out, emptying him like a sack. He willed himself not to search the faces of those who were seeing this right alongside him, figuring rightly if he felt some touch of shame for being seen with their son and brother, they would concur several times over. 

It seemed different than Barba remembered--brighter, sunnier, entirely too sweet. It was like seeing himself smiling wide in a childhood home video and thinking, _Now that doesn’t seem like me._ Too consumed with the way things were now, he could not appreciate how they’d once been. 

As the photo lingered, however, Barba changed his tune. Here was undoubtedly the best representation of Carisi thus far: not shunted off to the side, not prim and proper in his uniform, but smiling, arm thrown like a wide net to catch those closest to him. 

The pictures began to fade in and out of one another, a cheap graphic transition typical of television news when someone--

Barba bit slow, and hard, into his tongue. If superstition truly had a hold of him, he would not finish that thought.

It didn’t. 

_He_ did. 

_When someone was being memorialized… remembered, or met, for that brief moment before the world turned off and away from their death._

Barba tore his gaze from the television screen, but it was too little, too late. The image prowled at the backs of his eyes as his phone vibrated with recognition from others around the City--they’d seen it, too. Perhaps they were reaching out with words of comfort and support, but without looking to confirm, all Barba felt was a kind of targeted equal to that of the two-dimensional portrait gleaned from the news. 

Barba felt bile rise up like a roaring wave, and he excused himself to the men’s room. Nothing came of his departure--he was neither in time nor too late for any expulsion. The awful sensation continued to choke him instead, and one by one his faculties shut down. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t so much as look at himself under fluorescent lighting in a hospital bathroom. He couldn’t feel the burning in his face or the sweat speckling his brow and upper lip. His body seemed to consolidate itself in strictly its form, and nothing else that usually roamed and patterned and scoured beneath it. Barba was not his mind nor his spirit; only the functional passage by which those things were given a moment’s life. 

Barba screwed his eyes shut. 

He felt warmth and buzzing rise to his head, and expand in his ears like sea foam until all he heard was a soft ringing. He was dizzy for the sensation, felt his skin like it had gone to sleep and kept his mind awake. It hummed and charged, and he was left jumping out against it, each propulsion a vain attempt to wake himself up.

 _Do not do this,_ he told himself. They were the first words he’d figured in some minutes’ time. _Do not face death like a coward. Not again._

 _It’s not even your--_

He stopped himself there. The profound ache that spilled from his heart and infected the whole of his system asked a quiet, taunting, _Isn’t it?_

He wanted to scream and cry out, but was denied. 

Hands fisted and white-knuckled against the countertop, Barba curled forward like he meant to swan dive into the sink. His chest burned hot then cold, in rapid succession. He couldn't catch his breath for as perilously it was spun out of him.

Carisi had once tailed him in what suddenly felt like a similar situation: death, promised to the point of a gun cracking into his skull. 

_And_ life--unanswered for, but very much assumed. 

He remembered feeling like the very composition of the molecules making up his skin cells was giving up the game, and those joining hands to establish his muscle and bones were eyeing a similar coup. He was seconds from falling completely apart, then, and certain of it. Had Carisi not come in, his innate kindness obfuscating for himself the fact that he could come across as nosy and overbearing, Barba wasn't sure what would have come of him. Would he have stumbled, absent Carisi’s comforting presence, his words, his touch? 

And if Carisi hadn't come for him then, at his weakest, and seen the worst, would Barba have ever again felt so open, and for being so, have had the good sense to beg him back? 

He wondered if he'd sooner wish it all gone if the lapse in fate would excuse Carisi from precisely _this_ moment. 

He would. 

To keep Carisi from his new apartment, out of the facility of that building complex, Barba would have bet his composure, his sanity, and his lonely heart in one. Carisi wouldn't even know where Barba lived, much less that he'd moved. There wouldn't be any safety checks; Barba wouldn't allow himself that. There would be ample space between them, nothing to bring Carisi near enough to danger, much less drive him towards it because of Barba’s own petty grievances.

His counterfactual allowed for the idea that Barba would always, in every capacity, want the man he had. Carisi was a constant, but their coupling was as lonesome a singularity as Barba could imagine. Barba would know what he wanted--and had, if only briefly, in ways dirty and finite--every time he saw the man’s face. 

Carisi, who had always been cautious with himself but never with his love, expended it as though he had an unlimited supply, or didn’t think anything less was possible. 

Barba ran his hand under the faucet again, then slapped it to the back of his neck. Relief would not arrive for him so swiftly, however.

He heard the door open-- _Benson,_ he thought. Of course she’d follow him here. He was routinely surprised she kept herself from following him into judges’ chambers when a case tipped south. If it wasn’t psychopaths or criminals with bullets at their disposal, she was putting herself ahead needy, broken souls. 

Unsurprised wasn’t the word, however. Barba was thankful.

Even if all she could do was rub his back and softly lie to him, Barba wanted that. He supposed he was spoiled, now.

He turned, and wasn’t cognisant enough of his entire situation to feel disappointed. 

It was Dom who had followed him, not Benson. It was Dom who wore a sable-colored sweater over a cream collared shirt and wrinkled slacks. It was Dom who stared with Carisi’s watery-blue eyes, transfixed, before ducking his head and focusing on the line of empty sinks. When Barba realized how pitiful and _hopeless_ he must look, for Dom to have done that, he wiped at his face and sucked a fortifying swell of air into his lungs. He’d demand composure of himself, or at least get the look of it, before he wept before another Carisi.

Barba washed his hands again, then levied that act into washing his face with cold water from the automated sink. It wasn’t satisfying; there was never enough water to fill his cupped hands at any one time. The totally inconsequential and mundane experience nevertheless threw Barba headlong into memory--a particularly cruel effect hospitals seemed to bring out in people’s psyches. 

He was reminded of Carisi teasing how _big_ his hands were--never in bed, where he seemed to especially appreciate how much ground Barba could cover. No, he saved his tweaking commentary for when Barba, obviously cold, refused Carisi’s offer of gloves because _They won’t fit. Obviously._

Carisi would nod solemnly and say something colossally stupid. _Oh, right, your elephantiasis is acting up again._

Then he’d make an attempt for Barba’s hand, holding just one for the sake of warming it up. 

Being stuck in a bathroom with that disgustingly sweet man’s _father_ was a genuine test of his compunction, but to his credit, Barba resisted the urge to stew or scream or scrub his face raw with paper towels. He didn’t want to look any worse than he already did, even if matching situation to presentation would give him a certain satisfaction. 

Something--his pride, or perhaps Carisi’s--still felt at stake. The war was here, but there were hard-won battles he wouldn’t see tainted by some unsuspecting counterattack.

So Barba methodically washed and dried his hands, straightened then undid his collar, carefully removed, folded, and pocketed his tie, and thought himself a smudge more suited to returning to the world. 

But when Dom didn’t take the opportunity to relieve himself or wash his hands or generally make any use of where he’d put himself, Barba realized with some trepidation that Dom had intended to follow him and--what?

_Talk to him?_

And by that measure, make him feel any worse than he already did?

Or had he wanted to comfort Barba, before realizing he didn’t know how? 

Or worse, did seeing Barba--distraught, verging on weepy--make him decide he didn’t want to? 

The thought then twisted itself into something more familiar: that perhaps Dom was angry for the display, and meant to make his feelings clear. Perhaps he’s levy threats, or words as simmering-hot as to satisfy the urge. Did he have it in him to ask Barba to leave? Was this the excuse the entire Carisi clan had been waiting for--that Barba’s response to the tragedy, and not the tragedy itself, was causing undue distress? Barba found himself growing angry for the imagined slight, and ready, should Dom adopt it for his own. 

Barba released a slow breath, something audibly shaken. 

“Better?” 

Dom spoke as if he’d done something to see Barba to that end. And Barba, knowing he’d done everything but, was thoroughly thrown by the tender delivery. 

“It’s stressful. I don’t--I know I don’t have to tell you. But. It's not how I want to find out.” 

It was a lie on every plane of existence. Barba wasn't so precious with his feelings that he could contrive a means of hearing the worst in an attempt to alleviate its hurt on a _practicality._ Learning terrible, life-consuming news on a local spot between infomercials wasn’t ideal, no. 

It was, of course, the last thing he wanted to know. Full stop. 

“I thought we’d come past this.” 

Dom didn’t elaborate, and Barba didn’t ask him to, so the words arrived at their own pace, slow, as if they were awoken from a blissful sleep. 

“Hospital visits. He was always getting picked on, beat up, when he was younger…” 

Not sleep, Barba realized. _Willful blindness._

Barba said nothing as to what he was thinking--that ending up in the hospital wasn’t a result of being _picked on,_ but assaulted. 

“He’s mentioned it,” Barba said, thinking of the Bobby Bianchis of elementary school, the near-mental breakdown at fifteen, and all the rest. He often wondered how much the traumas of today were informed by those he’d overcome or, at the very least, let pass him by. Barba took himself by example and realized with far too little irony, _All of it. Christ Almighty._

“I never understood it,” Dom continued, genuinely at a loss, “Why he let it go on.” 

_“Really?”_ Barba asked, not meaning to sound overly superior and needlessly rude, but here he was, both those things and to the hilt. He couldn’t help but make himself known, and in the sharpness of his words, cleared any turgidity from the still waters of their meeting.

Dom looked at him. His stare wasn’t hard so much as unrelenting. Barba was surprised to find the latter didn’t predetermine the former, because the look never crossed paths into the bands of violence he was most familiar with. 

“It wasn't about _that,_ ” Dom insisted. He’d lowered his voice, and again, Barba’s presuppositions were thrown asunder. “He was a child, for Christ's sake.”

“He knew, even then. And he was made to believe it was something... terrible. A sin.” Barba felt his jaw stiffen, and knew--as he’d known most of his life, as was proven to him by his father’s hand--that it would never be without cause. 

“He knew he had more to be scared of than losing some fights. What would they say about him, what would they do, if they were more angry than bored? _Who wouldn't they tell?”_

He was talking, hs realized, in search of an answer. Even for all the cliches Carisi fit into as perfectly as a three-piece suit, there were things he shirked, definitions he refused to have applied to his name. For all their arguing, Barba felt he’d summed it up nicely. It was a shame he didn’t have his preferred audience. 

_Fuck me,_ Barba thought. Carisi was unconscious somewhere in this hospital, body open to gleaming instruments and practiced hands, and all Barba wanted to do was berate him with a good argument.

Barba silenced himself, finally. Words and thoughts, both folding in on the other. 

He imagined Carisi’s disappointment when--if--he ever found out the words he’d spat, the tone he’d adopted when speaking to the senior Carisi. Despite all their arguments concerning what should or must be said, Barba had never presumed it was his place to speak. Such was a point of tension--it would never truly be Barba’s problem, airing aloud all of Carisi’s grievances. 

To wade into private conversations, now, and pull them as rocks from a stream and offer them up was not Barba’s best showing.

He got the distinct feeling they both felt that way. 

“He’ll be okay,” Dom said, gruffly, and with his chin tucked down it seemed the sentiment was mostly for himself. 

“I want to believe that, too.” Aware that he sounded all to cynical and craven, Barba threw his voice towards hopeful idealism and amended, “We’ll know it soon enough.” 

The encouraging smile he attempted was what undid the entire game. Dom lowered his gaze and Barba felt like a heel for doing that to an old man. A _father,_ for as much as that was supposed to mean. 

Barba shouldn’t have thought it. And even for doing so, he should have been better at minding the channel between his mind and his mouth. There were heavy tolls to pay for shortsightedness. 

“My father died here,” Barba said. He might have spoken in a rush for how poorly considered the sentiment was, except the words arrived slowly, in strict single file. One after another they fell, executed. “In this hospital. Almost twenty years ago. Sixth floor.” 

Dom didn’t breathe a word of sympathetic apology; he knew well enough from his son’s telling that Barba did not want for that. 

“The last time I saw him--alive--he cracked a cane across my face, broke--” Barba’s voice mimicked his speech, but he was too old and too tired to concern himself with the display. 

He finished resolutely: “My jaw.”

Barba fell silent again. He felt wounded--again. 

He hadn’t told Carisi that story, and he didn’t know why. He’d shared other grizzly details, awful turns from when he was young and frightened, then a little older and angry. The time he and his father exchanged blows, and Barba, surprised at himself, began to issue an apology that was slapped out of his mouth, half-formed.

But not this, not the final blow. Barba supposed he was ashamed for the instance being nearer now than not. Because he hadn’t passed that invisible threshold from which he could deem that something happened _in the past,_ he was trapped, unable to say, _this happened seventeen years ago._ He saw it in the young people Benson brought to him, simultaneously shattered and reformed into a solid slab of marble. They hesitated when the abuse caught up to them and they could no longer brush it off. _When I was seventeen…_

He was twenty-five. He was a wunderkind, of a kind, barreling out of Harvard and stealing positions long-promised to others, specifically those young men who had kept their fathers’ names, for that was as much a gift as birth itself. Barba might have wrapped himself in his degree and accolades, but there was a name at the top of his sterling resume--one he had chosen for himself, for his business cards and the golden nameplate that was laid with such care on his corner office door. 

Barba was never his father’s successful son. He'd made sure of that. 

He wondered if he hadn't gone into that hospital room, asking for it. 

Barba shrugged heavily. At the memory, for Dom, for the terrible circumstances that had brought them together sooner than either desired. As far as every wrong thing he could possibly say went, Barba said them in absolutes. 

“I don't know.” 

Dom shifted his weight, looked briefly at his reflection in the mirror, and ducked his head back down. He seemed to check himself, confirm his presence in ways Barba wouldn't bear. 

“Smart guy like you?”

It was that same deliberate tone, and again Barba was inclined to snap to attention, to search the speaker for an explanation. He did this, and it was Dom who shrugged, uncertain, hapless, desperate. 

Theirs was a strange, low-grade confrontation. Barba felt challenge crackle in the air, but for a purpose he could not ascertain. Whatever feelings Dom had towards him, Barba didn’t see them playing out in a bathroom skirmish.

Spurred to action, Barba made a choice. He could not constrict or affect what he was waiting on--a positive prognosis, or even just a hopeful smile from someone in the know--so absent that, Barba corralled all it was he feared and dreaded. He drew it in tight, held it between himself and the world, and slowly sought to crush it. 

He decided to believe with his whole heart that Carisi wouldn’t die here, that his and Barba’s father’s existences would _never_ meet.

Genuine or imagined, resolution nevertheless steeled down his spine. And though he shared nothing of his thought processes, Dom nodded in agreement. It was a more concrete gesture than either of their shrugs, and beyond that--the deafening blows Barba had sustained years ago, and a year ago, respectively.

It didn't break bone or tear skin, but Barba felt it calcify somewhere deep inside. He imagined his body would remember the exchange long after time and distance stole it from his memory. 

Dom clapped a hand to Barba’s shoulder--as brief and minute an exchange as their words had been, and somehow monumental in the scope of Barba’s worldview of other, older men.

He’d fucked his share, but had seldom come to revere any. They were so often men who’d come up into power and known nothing less, and were heavy-handed with it as a result. They were not to be trusted or confided in, and the lessons Barba learned from them felt cautionary at best. 

He didn’t know where to place the seemingly kindly Dominick Carisi Sr. in their ranks. 

Dom said, “I'll see you back out there.”

Barba meant to return the nod he’d received, to give as good as he got, even if he had to misappropriate spells of confidence to do it.

But the moment passed him by.

-

Barba returned to the frey and did not make another unscheduled departure. He felt heads nod tiredly towards him, sets of eyes lift then fall. He felt recognized, but not cased. Everyone was too tired to work up any ire. 

He waited in congress with the Carisis, Benson, and Chief Deputy Dodds, who surprised Barba with his silent, steadfast presence. Others littered the area, strangers filtering in and out throughout the night as their prayers were answered or not. Barba couldn’t help but count the instances, thinking the scale might shift this way or that by the time it was weighed before him. 

At midnight, a voice seemed to reach out to only them, and turn each head on a fine golden tether. They moved as one, all sworn to attention as though they were devotees called to prayer. They witnessed, they observed.

The worn plastic ID pinned to the _v_ of his scrubs and hanging at an angle over his breast gave his name: Dr. A. Rishi. He was perhaps Barba’s age, maybe older. He was lean, with pitched-forward shoulders that Barba could imagine ached all the time, though was only indulged at home or in private. He could imagine them cracking backwards, alighting pockets of air into raucous sound. 

There was some grey speckling his jet-black hair, a thing Barba noticed about people now, always in search of the same bizarre stripe that had nestled in his own crown. When he huffed about it, Carisi swore he’d seen as much on a million men, but Barba was yet to be at his side when he pointed out the aberration in nature.

He was holding a clipboard--uselessly, Barba thought, because there was all of one sheet of paper tucked under its metal cap. He didn’t once look at it, and from there Barba extrapolated that its purpose laid elsewhere. It took only a moment for Barba to figure it was the doctor’s grip on display. His hand was steady, a stone outcropping where everything around him was physically ambivalent and prone to sinking and lifting, like the heads of all those left behind to wait for news of their loved ones. 

Barba, who felt like he was eventually going to shake out of his own skin, thought that was a neat trick. 

He introduced himself-- _We can read,_ Barba thought anxiously, and eyeballed the nametag to silently make his point. _You're wasting time._

Dr. Rishi then remarked that he was the surgeon who, with his team, treated Carisi when he arrived, and Barba wanted to shout the man down, to slap that handful of useless words to the floor. As plain and simply speech could have been said for anyone in that room, making their own introduction. From Carisi’s parents, _We raised him._ From his sisters, _We tease him._ From the NYPD, _We work with him. We let him down. We did this._

From Barba himself-- _I fuck him,_ because Barba imagined if he actually started to hear simple platitudes taking up the air around such perilous circumstances, he’d distress himself, and go the crude route as a result. 

So he bit into his cheek and said nothing. He lifted his head so as to stand apart from the sinking crowd, and waited to hear something necessary.

Dr. Rishi used the term “tenuous” to describe the “situation.” 

He spoke of blood loss and a poor reaction to antibiotics, and how his condition required close monitoring. He brightened some when he noted the brachial artery was unharmed, though surrounding damage made surgery to remove bullet and bone fragments an arduous task. He praised the specialists who afforded their time and skillsets. 

He cautioned that the femoral artery was less fortunate, but quick action was taken by responding officers and medical staff alike to stymie the bleeding. 

“I have concerns about the shock he experienced, and the potential for nerve and neurological damage, going forward. We will, of course, be monitoring him closely.” 

It seemed hardly a conclusion, except the doctor had stopped speaking. Barba watched the reality land on the faces of those gathered. It was a blitzkrieg; they were taken out swiftly, in one awful blast. A direct hit. 

The sisters started in on a disjointed chorus of disbelief and outrage--none of which they could nail down into sentiments. Kitty tucked into Dom’s side again.

“What does this mean?” Barba heard the words from his own voice, and joined them with, “Practically” and “In terms of his recovery” in some sensible order he could be proud of, later. 

He broke form with a strangled plea of, “And when can we see him?”

In the doctor’s face, Barba didn't see the same spark of uncertainty, of questioning, regarding his presence that he’d encountered earlier with the more discerning nurse. He wondered if the doctor had been briefed, though he couldn't imagine what would be said. 

_There’s his parents, a gaggle of sisters, half the NYPD, and a self-righteous bisexual lawyer out there!_

Of the low-grade disapproval, Barba told himself perhaps it had been there, perhaps he hadn't been watching for it. He got instead what he was hoping for--Dr. Rishi, looking relieved for the opportunity to speak not towards distant absolutes, but the carefully drawn and quietly rendered compromises that made up the living human body.

He explained the injuries and the surgeries required to answer them. The bullet in his side cost him several inches of large intestine, but the surgery went well and leakage was minimal. The one in his thigh was dangerously close to the femoral artery, which they had to be mindful of while removing bits of bullet. He sustained substantive muscle trauma there, and nerve damage was almost guaranteed. Like a financial projection, Dr. Rishi suspected some limited mobility, though with therapy they’d have every reason to be hopeful for a substantive recovery. 

The arm was a mess--not that the term was used, but Barba heard as much for the pains the doctor used to speak around it. The bullet traveled partially through its length and shattered bone in several places along his forearm. It would be “revisited.”

Carisi--for as little as his name was used in the detailed description of his body given by a stranger--sounded as though he’d half come apart.

Barba focused on what was key--the repeated terms, those stressed and those laid out between bookended pauses. _Trauma, swelling, rest, recovery. Trauma, swelling, rest, recovery. Trauma, swelling, rest, recovery._ It was a very short map towards a very long process. 

He listened as, over and over, the _“prolonged sedation”_ headline was padded with iterations of _“rest”_ and _“recovery.”_ Barba picked up the terms that were tucked away, bookended between beats of a sentence, absent Carisi’s actionable self. _“While intubated”_ and _“necessary lifesaving measures.”_

Barba fell into a kind of trance, and heard himself ask all the stage-setting questions, complete the kind of due diligence he practiced when confronting witnesses on the stand. He asked after timetables for improvement, options should the outlook deteriorate, visiting times, and the importance of moving Carisi into a private room, given the shooting had broken as news. 

At least to the latter, Dr. Rishi had an answer they could appreciate. 

“We are in the process of doing that now,” he said. “A nurse will be by as soon as he’s situated, and you will be able to see him briefly.” His lips parted, then, hung for a sentence that was itself a capital offense. “If you so choose.”

The addendum made Barba’s heart sink. It went without saying Carisi wouldn’t look _well_ for his condition, but Barba didn’t stop to think he wouldn’t want to see some semblance of him, anyway. 

Being given the warning made him reconsider his gumption. 

What, Barba wondered, was he ready to see? 

Dr. Rishi accepted another round of polite thanks and hugs from Dom and Kitty, then shook various proffered hands--Dodds’, Benson’s, and Barba’s, who didn’t stop to think why he was relegated into one group and not the other--before leaving the group to another bout of waiting. 

Benson squeezed his hand again--a seemingly impossible feat, as Barba had her pegged for across the room. 

Everyone felt distant. Even for all the collapsing into one another people did, their thoughts were their own, steeping and churning behind similarly glazed eyes. 

They'd all been given one set of shared information. It was any guess as to what each would do with it. 

For his own, Barba felt the empty spaces inside of him solidify. They ground against one another, clipping corners and shifting as Barba couldn’t expand himself, couldn’t lose the breath he was holding or sacrifice any more room to the ache that wasn’t already home to a vital organ. He likened it to passing empty apartments in a building: some loophole had been exploited to purchase them, but no lives operated in their space. They were deadened inside, absent but not uncounted. Barba had to acknowledge their existence, even for disregarding their usefulness.

 _No,_ he thought, challenging both himself and his overwrought metaphor. At least the spaces weren't filled with screaming or crying. No one was hidden behind those walls, plotting trouble or wasting away. They weren't ruinous spaces, they weren’t _anything._ An absence of purpose was not synonymous with negative value.

Though less satisfied than he’d hoped he’d be, Barba sucked in a fortifying breath--the kind to sustain him through an entire journey, the kind he fulfilled as though it was his last. 

He took to his phone, thumbing swift messages--to his mother, to Carmen, to Rollins, to Fin, to a few colleagues who’d learned of the shooting, to friends who knew what it meant--each losing detail but gaining purpose as he ran roughshod over the same sentiment. 

_He’s out of surgery. He’s been intubated and isn’t conscious yet. Bullets out except for part of the one that shattered his radius. He’s going to be okay._

_He’s out of surgery. Intubated. Not conscious yet. Bullets out except for arm (broken). Going to be okay._

_Out of surgery. Going to be okay._

_Going to be okay._

Each message he sent out, he read back to himself in affirmation. 

A man made an approach. 

Barba thought as much in those exact terms: this man crafted each step, honed his presence, checked his sympathetic gaze as if it was four feet behind him in a car mirror. He was a man fastened together: no quality he had was innate; all were chosen for their worth in application and execution. 

He caught Barba’s eye because his suit was more pristine than his--not that the cut or tailoring was any finer, but it wasn’t wrinkled. He hadn’t been sat there, teeming with despair, like the rest of them. 

His first move was to saddle up to Kitty, a hand gentle at her elbow, then ready his other to firmly shake Dom’s. 

He was a public relations representative in spirit, if no longer on his tax returns. He was Bradley Lambert, and come March, he’d be making double his old paycheck operating as a fixer of sorts for the NYPD. His official title was a veritable word jumble of “communications,” “outreach” and “support,” and not in that order. He did much the same work, still, in corralling the ugly image of killer cops and their victims, and painting all with broad, bright strokes. Barba practically saw him, power washer in hand. 

Benson, perhaps seeing what Barba did, cut in. Her’s was the warm and familiar face the Carisi’s knew. She had the most stellar reputation of anyone in the room, per Carisi’s insistence. Dom and Kitty were enraptured by her, now that they had the kind of news worth sharing. Tommy, who had arrived around seven to hold Bella for hours on end, had gone again to check on their child, who was with a sitter. Barba was sorry he missed the good news.

Barba watched the sisters embrace and wipe away one another’s tears. Bella strayed, again, to stand at Barba’s side, and lean again him in a manner that was far too familiar for their relationship. Barba might have bristled, but Bella’s attention wasn’t on him. Like Barba, she was watching the grand sum of her family. They were people, flawed and beloved, who, for as long as he loved Carisi, Barba would undoubtedly contend with, sharing air and debating space. 

The only means by which to remove his association with them would be Carisi’s departure--from the relationship, or from existence. 

_Perspective,_ Barba thought bitterly, was the last thing he wanted. 

And maybe he shuddered some, or else Bella wrapped both her arms around just one of his instinctively. 

Barba wondered why the whole family was here, when only Bella and Carisi turned up for Tommy’s court case. 

“Is it strange to see them all together?” Barba murmured, not realizing he hadn’t meant to. “Here?”

Bella understood him. 

“I mean, it’s Sonny. He’s everyone’s favorite.” The flippancy of her tone suggested an unspoken, _Mine, too._ “And he didn’t do anything wrong, which sounds insane, I know, but we’re not _actually_ the kind of Italians who show up for the public shaming. Because we _are_ the kind of Catholics who prefer agonizing over the bad shit in private.”

“How noble.”

Bella shrugged, then swept back the loose locks of hair the gesture had disturbed. For all the naming she did of her and her family--Catholics, Italians--there was nothing more all-American than a curtain of blonde hair looped and loosened from a topknot. 

“You’re such a smartass,” she said, and jabbed him in the bicep with an index finger. There seemed to be no end to the ways she could impose on him, physically and not. “No wonder he loves you.”

“Thank you,” Barba said. “For saying that. The back half, anyway.”

The air between them changed with the advent of Barba presenting that most holistic offering: his appreciation for something minor. For as simple a thing, it was rare. Perhaps people offered him innocent compliments more often than he thought, but he only took so many as such, and acknowledged even fewer. As a result, he was less masterful at the great, broad guessing game made of gauging people's reactions. If he answered gratefully and they'd only said what they did because it fed from a constant runnel of politeness, a literal babbling brook, they both looked a fool.

With Carisi’s youngest sister, the turn was a new one. They went so far left Barba felt them twist around. Between them, electricity hummed through a dense, stormy air, clearing an erratic path for Bella to follow if she dared. 

There was nothing about a woman layering an XL hoodie under a petite-sized peacoat that wasn’t inherently daring.

“I can’t speak for my parents, but,” Bella raised her chin to indicate her sisters. “That’s the problem they have with you. They know he loves you. They think you’re gonna creep in on their share.”

“But you don’t think that,” Barba observed, not quite a question.

Bella shrugged. “I got Tommy. I know that’s now how it works.” She smirked a little, and took a moment to cherish the thing she’d get to say for its absurdity. “Probably doesn’t help you’re exactly their type.”

She didn’t get was what she was hoping for--a laugh, a chuckle, a shudder, _something_ to thread through the ADA and allow her to glimpse the _one weird thing_ her brother professed Barba did, the _one thing_ that left him endlessly fascinated. Barba couldn’t be scandalized--not with the life he’d led or the work he did--but he could mime it masterfully. Carisi had always been enthralled by the ways Barba played his humanity, accentuating the parts he’d stricken from his own record. He kept them up like hobbies, tending to their purpose. 

Not that he was a sociopath--Carisi was quick to correct her when he’d seen the thought fix itself between her eyes. Barba had a vast well of humanity, sometimes so great Carisi feared Barba might drown in it. But sometimes, for no good reason, he stood at its endless shores, watched the one waters, and ran falsehoods from a tap. 

There was a difference in how he laughed when he meant to be charming, and how he laughed when charmed. Near imperceptible, but there, and chosen. Carisi once marveled to Bella, who still didn’t quite understand what she’d been told to look for, _It’s like he learned how to operate before he learned how to be._ Then, with the kind of reverence only peach schnapps could carry him towards, he’d added, _It’s some Haley Joel Osment, A.I. shit._

But Bella didn’t recognize it in Barba. She considered the possibility that her brother had _looked_ for something, then decided he’d seen it, all because he wished to emulate such behavior. She wondered, _Why._

Barba only met her with the huffy line: “Now’s hardly the time for mean-spritied jokes.”

Bella counted on her fingers all the winningest aspects of Barba’s potential as a bedfellow. 

“Good-looking, hotshot lawyer? A guy who argues for a living? Full head of hair? If that’s not the backstory of every Ken doll lying buck naked in our basement…” She shook her head deliberately. “And then it’s _Sonny_ who steals the storyline. Of course they’re cheesed.” 

“It’s their own fault,” Barba said, answering joke for joke because at least that way, it stung less. “For ever thinking Ken was straight.” 

Bella gave a great, shrill, over-loud laugh that ended in a wheeze, a snort, and her turning away so that her mother’s gaze wouldn’t find her. 

She socked Barba again in the arm and chastised him thusly: “Such a _diiiiick.”_

It felt childish and silly in ways Barba never felt at liberty to be. He’d seen Carisi on the phone with his sister, though, saw the faces he pulled and the jokes they shared on Skype. They smiled now as they did as children--Barba knew that instinctively, even for being wholly without proof. He supposed, given he had an eyewitness with an errant elbow in his side, there was no better time for exactly that line of questioning. 

“What was he like as a child?”

The question emerged as dreamlike as any answer Barba could imagine. In his line of work, there were definitive limits in all things--statutes of limitations, holding periods, prison terms--which shaped his grasp on and understanding of time. It drew itself down, sky to earth, a blockade, overlarge on its own, but useless for the vast emptiness into which it fell. 

Recognizable and daunting, yes. But the breaks and stoppages were finite. There always seemed to be more open space, with endless question as to what step to take in which direction.

Bella took the blockades like cracks in a sidewalk, and soon had flung herself back to that time.

“Our sisters’ plaything. A complete doll in his own right, long before I came down the pike.” She smiled, having seen all the pictures. “They’re older and so was he, but… he was my best friend, always. My protector. And he was happy.” 

There, Bella wavered. 

“Middle school… things changed. He got bullied a lot, tried to keep quiet about it. It was bad, and there was no talking him out of… I dunno. Going back for more.” Discomfort rocked her, and as she bit and worried her lips, Barba didn’t doubt her toes were performing similar calisthenics inside the hug of her winter socks. She felt guilty for things so long gone, she could scarcely summon detail enough to outfit their retelling. “Like, it’d be there, on his face--the evidence, you know?--and somehow he didn’t get talked to about it. I got an afterschool snack, he got a bag of frozen peas for his eye.”

She ran a hand over her hair, unkempt top-knot and all. 

“He got more involved in the church, and that really helped. He was happy again.” 

She didn’t share these things lightly, but didn't Barba smell the weight of life-or-death on her breath, either. He supposed she, like her brother, developed a penchant for dressing up the truth in its Sunday best. 

“I dunno what I thought about it then. If I thought about it,” she said, speaking to Barba’s query without being asked. Her grip tightened around his arm, and Barba decided even for rooting him there at her side, it created a sense of displacement. He was here, having a tentative conversation amidst miserable circumstances, _because he couldn’t be absolutely anywhere else._

“I kind of thought he’d explain it to me. You know, one day, when all the important shit is just… childish, lookin’ back.” She looked around the room, clocking the distant, uninterested faces for all the kinds of blame she felt she deserved. “I’m scared it was always important. I’m fucking terrified it was _never_ childish.” Her next breath rattled through her lungs, and Bella wanted to crush her eyes shut in shame, certain Barba felt it grate against him, as unsanitary an exchange as a sneeze.

“What if we never have that conversation?”

_It wasn’t. You will._

Barba didn’t have the authority to say either. 

When Bella collapsed against his chest in a fit of retching sobs, all relief colored with pent-up terror, and wormed her way close amidst his layers of jacket and shirt front, Barba did not feel conflicted about embracing her. It wasn’t coercion on her part, but she’d fooled him into it all the same. With her eyes and her closeness, she swore to him, _We can have this._

Barba, for feeling as sick and wanting as he did, answered back, _We can pretend._

At the very least, he refused to attempt to quell her outburst. People looked at her, and he was there, an extension of family. His was the arm she clung to, the torso she buried her face in like a frightened rabbit. There was no seeing her without him.

Barba should have known better than to be surprised for her innate cleverness. 

It was only by her will that his goals were accomplished: he was not made to disappear. He was not diminished.

But Barba would be remiss not to recognize the necessity in Bella’s out act. She threw her weight around and hung off him as though he was the only thing keeping her off the ground. Her grip in turns smoothed and scrambled, and she dug for purchase in every jutted-out crag that raised itself up to account for the combined whole of him. Of all the Carisi sisters, the psychological toll of thinking only of her brother and knowing he might not appear as imagined, weighed heaviest on Bella. She was the family’s baby, but Carisi’s chosen responsibility. He learned to take care of her even before he’d entirely learned to do that for himself. 

Boyfriend’s parole hearings, unexpected motherhood, AC units shitting the bed--Carisi had gotten her through it all by shouldering some of the world’s haunts for her, and fending off its terrors. And when he couldn’t do it all alone, he’d brought Barba in, trusting the man with the life so central to his sister’s happiness.

After that, it was hardly a leap to trust Barba with his whole heart.

By the time Bella had stopped shuddering against him, and Barba had forgotten he was holding a young woman in ways and for reasons he hadn’t since he was a young man, reality had stricken them both. 

Barba huffed something like a sigh caught in an updraft. It aimed for the sky, even if it never reached so much as his eyeline.

Bella gave a watery laugh, inspired by the fact that no one had come back around to tell them a mistake was made. Carisi was somewhere in the building, alive and intent to stay that way.

“Hey,” he murmured, meaning to continue, to _persist,_ and say something quietly profound.

He supposed he always meant to do that, and chance had fooled him into thinking he had some skill for it. Logic told him that was his studious nature at work, the neurons firing in his brain calculating the most swift, least retrograde answers. The piles of coffee grinds in his garbage bin told him it was the caffeine. Benson would insist it was the whole package, the pieces touched and met by the ever-expanding swell of his opening heart. 

Carisi, he thought, he hoped, he dreamed, would kiss him sweetly, and not expect another word.

Barba shook his head, at a loss. 

“It’ll be okay,” Bella supplied, and Barba found that was just the thing, so precisely plucked by the air and turned about in the hand, that he had meant to say. 

-

“Have we got family here for Dominick Carisi?”

They were summoned, and a chorus of confirmations arose as the Carisis stood, identical in their concern, among other things. Barba alone was given a curious once-over from the nurse as he moved to join their ranks. It was his best features that betrayed him--the hooded green eyes and dark hair--as well as the concern he wore not quite fitting his face as well as it might a woman’s.

“Sir?”

“Yes,” Barba replied, a touch too-loud to overcome his thinking about exactly this question. “I’m his partner. And his lawyer.”

Barba couldn’t think past this point--if they refused him or not, he couldn’t picture it. His eye went to the Carisis, who had been watchful of him. He wondered if they’d see his announcement for a betrayal of some family secret, or at the very least, something they had no desire to grapple with ahead of an audience of nurses. Anxiety tore through his body until it forged for itself an easy path--a race track which it was the sole racer and only winner. Barba got played again and again.

Again, it was Bella who moved to include Barba, a simple sidestep that shifted the earth. She broke from Tommy, who had arrived only ten minutes ago, still red-faced from the cold. 

Barba’s world was saved by a tiny woman in fleece-lined leggings and a hoodie under her pink peacoat.

“Sonny would want Rafael there,” she said, punctuating the thought by keyholing her arm into the crook of his. She then fixed her stare dead ahead, and not at her family--a trick she’d had an entire childhood to learn. There were no objections because she did not allow eye contact enough to draw even a supportive response. 

The nurse, hearing none, led the way.

“Thank you,” Barba murmured, another muted affirmation, yet there was no thinking this one should be kept quiet.

He tried to take note of where they were going and the way they’d come, but his gaze kept sweeping over the hall, leaping down corners before they’d turned them, and trying all the while to see over the bouncing, swooping ponytale of the nurse leading their canvasing party. 

As they walked, Barba asked questions: Who were the nurses on this floor? Would Carisi be tended to by a select few, or whoever was on shift? When were visitors allowed? Who could regularly appraise them of Carisi’s condition?

In the collective silence, he felt compelled to have whatever answers existed for whatever questions he could conjur. And if there were none to have, at least his voice would be the one climbing atop others’. At least that much of him would be recognized. 

There was a room, drawn in lavender to mimic the purple and dark greens of the waiting-room carpet four floors below them. It didn't seem to match where they were now, amidst taupe hallways with two navy blue racing stripes, some remnant of a terrible misunderstanding of color therapy and interior design. 

The eighties.

The lavender room was not merely misplaced, it was crafted from somewhere else, by some other thinking, and positioned there. Hung like a crooked painting, it demanded to be observed, yet it's closed door and narrow window denied the audience it drew. 

Barba couldn’t see Carisi, but the feeling of his heart thudding so hard as to bruise itself against his ribcage told him he was dangerously close.

He took in what he could. Right off, the care and deliberateness of the attending nurses was evident. Their bodies were bent like faucet heads, their labors spilling out over a figure lying prone, lying waste. 

Barba wasn’t the type to have men or women tumble before him; rather, he met them respectably, and if there was any action to follow it was sinking or chasing or something not so terribly profound. But _Carisi._ Carisi invited something else. His openness of spirit, coupled with his blue eyes and ready smile, got people excited. They’d flirt right there in the open, as if they thought this perfect specimen was such a rarity, letting it pass _without_ a pass would be a regret they’d surely carry to the grave. 

Barba supposed it was something else that drew people in to Carisi’s orbit--because he couldn’t smile for the tube down his throat, and his bright blue eyes weren’t on display. 

He caught his first glimpse: a hairline he knew, had pressed kisses into, had traced like coastline with his eyes and could map it now, an expert cartographer. He wasn’t much for an artist, but if asked he could guide some better-skilled hand, inch by inch, and raise Carisi’s exact and entire body from blank paper. 

It was only forehead and a swoop of hair, but Barba did not doubt who he was seeing. He’d have sworn it on the stand, or typed it himself into record.

Then the bodies shifted, as if given to a gust of wind. Barba saw south of forehead into face, west of hair into ruddy brown gauze and then whitest pillow. 

Carisi was unnaturally pale, wane, and looked concerned. The expression on his face was of permanent tightness; he was in pain, or else dreaming he was. In such a state, Barba supposed it was a difference without a distinction. 

The vision left him with a strange sense of wonderment.

For all his hand-wringing, here Carisi was. Not yet proven _whole,_ because a glimpse from the neck up couldn’t do that, but Barba felt infinitely more at ease, seeing the man’s face, knowing his thoughtful nature and kind sentimentality, his generosity, his grit, all of it still had a place to congregate. 

He wanted in, he wanted to be closer, to confirm. He threw his searching gaze to Bella, but in her haste, she’d gone on ahead. She didn’t think to save him again. She couldn't. Her own pain demanded that she go, appeal it, and see her brother. 

Barba didn't blame her, not entirely. 

He stood nearest the door, hopeful he might still slip in. 

“Just family,” a disembodied voice insisted.

And, “Immediate family only.”

Barba knew, as a product of a world that continued to question his being there, some twelve hours into his stay, that he was being refused.

Tommy was slower to understand, but got there in due time. 

He surveyed the scene. The Carisis inside, Barba on the outs. 

“You should be in there. He’d want you in there,” Tommy said, certain, and as if Barba needed to hear it, as if he didn’t know.

(Tommy was half-right: Barba needed to hear it.)

“He’s unconscious. Barging in would only be for me, not him.” 

“Still, though.” 

Barba didn’t know how to respond. He did not doubt Tommy’s good intentions, only what they’d get him. Were he in a clearer state of mind, Barba supposed he’d have appreciated how far Tommy had come from accepting the world doling out its abuses on the undeserving, shouldering his share, to calling out every minor slight. 

Instead, all Barba managed was to rub his own face, pressing hard at his right temple, trying to alleviate the thrumming there. 

“How have you been, Tommy?” 

Barba couldn't tear his gaze from the sliver of window, the altering crevice of space that opened and closed as bodies shifted beyond it. But still, some part of him knew better than to do this in silence. Perhaps if he wasted some breath, he wouldn't gag himself on all he felt he had to hold.

Tommy blew a breath and answered, “Not great. It’s scary. And, you know, this has really shaken Bella. And--and Sonny’s been like a real brother to me. Well, you know.” 

“Before all this,” Barba clarified, and he briefly wondered if his chest felt _unnaturally_ tight, or if the cold ache he imagined spidering out to touch his ribs was merely par for the course.

“Oh. Yeah, I’ve been okay.” Tommy shrugged. “Christmas was awkward as hell.” 

Barba supposed he must have nodded at that, but his concentration slipped fast from Tommy, and circled Carisi like a pack of dogs. On the backs of his teeth and clicking through the base of his jaw, Barba recognized two distinct fixtures. They were pillars of emotion and behavior, and he circled each, drawing a figure eight as he confused himself with their dual purposes.

He felt unmitigated horror for the event, and disgust for its making. Barba slowed his thoughts and tried to station them solely where the action was: in that groove amidst space and time where he might be able to curry influence over either. Carisi was injured, lost to his best faculties. Barba had to see him returned, and then, because he could do nothing to reverse the wrong, had to take every pain to _name it_ fully.

Beyond seeing that Carisi was, as promised, alive, Barba now had a fierce appetite _to know._ Everything. To compound every bit of awful news, every heinous detail, into a great mass. It would look and feel insurmountable by its end, and Barba hoped it was. He hoped to operate in its shadow, because only death could march itself over, and perhap it was his greatest enemy, but they’d once been close.

Once, death had met Barba’s head and kissed it with the cold, curved lip of a .22. 

Maybe they were friends. 

Maybe Barba could ask a favor. 

Barba closed his eyes against the thought, trapping it in somewhere deep. He arrived with a new request: _Please. Don’t let it get that close._

He opened his eyes again and stared hard through the window, fixing his gaze where he’d seen that sliver of Carisi, where he could aim to see more. 

Agreeing to the method felt like a cop-out. Barba knew this wasn’t how they operated, no matter the circumstance. Neither party was so fixed that the other had to scramble and jump to catch a glimpse. 

Their being together, Barba thought--and besides the past day, he’d had plenty of time to think--it wasn’t fate and it wasn’t chance. He knew it six months ago in bed, not being the first to wake for once. He knew it a year ago, watching Carisi figure out his invitation, and marvel at his own response. 

He knew last night, when his frustration and disappointment couldn’t keep him from smiling at the pictures Carisi sent, much less from sending one of his own.

What they had was asked and answered for, daily.

With fate or chance, Barba could get lucky. Fate did not so much as smile down on him, but smirk, and cast aspersions it was just as quick to undo. 

_You’re past your prime. / Here’s a young man smack-bang in the center of his._

_You’re unhappy, unpleasant, and coming unglued. / He can hold you together._

_You’re happy, now. / Are you happy, now?_

For that matter, Barba wasn’t going to hand their happening over to consequence, that bitter partner to chance. If chance were to blame, maybe their joining would have been kinder, sweeter, and an all around more charming story than it was. Chance could get a mention at a dinner party. 

This was built. Their relationship was a product of their own making, mishaps and false-starts and great leaps forward and all. Carisi was his, and in no small way, they’d earned one another.

Barba stormed off any thoughts to the contrary. He knew what he was doing, trying to tell himself stories. He’d misconstrue what he and Carisi were, burnish it, tar and chip away at its edges. Anything to temper how he felt about it, really, and how ruined he’d feel if he lost it.

Staring so resolutely through a narrow window at an obscured figure finally paid off.

Barba saw him, nestled tight between a shoulder and a turned head, and then Theresa, who moved to embrace Gina to her right. 

There didn’t seem to be enough of him, under the sheet that dragged from his feet to his chest. Barba was certain there were parts gone--entire limbs, organs, god knew what else. There were great swathes of him missing--there had to be. This slim picture spelled only ruin. All of Carisi could not be summed up in that pale, sullen face, lips wiped of their color, lashes darker and spidered, wet and gummy with the adhesive used to keep them closed during surgery. 

Inexplicably, Barba saw all this and thought, _We’re the same now._

He eyed the nurse playing gatekeeper. Immediate family first, she’d said. Or, as it quickly became, immediate family _only._ The Carisis monopolized all the space, and because Barba could not bring himself to object while every living person in the vicinity had fallen so silent as to make any disruption an assault on the ears, Barba took to observing where and what he could to better know Carisi’s condition.

He studied his family. 

Theresa, the oldest, looked upon her brother with so far a stare it was as if she meant to put another ten years between them. 

Gina caught but a glimpse, and that was enough. She turned and stared at the opposite wall but did not, Barba lamented, leave the room, offer her place, rescind her claim. 

Dom looked stricken, guilty and ashamed and altogether uneasy for seeing his son in such dire straits. He looked--if Barba could believe it--as though he hadn’t expected _this._ His presence was quickly preoccupied with Bella’s, as she wrapped her skinny arms around her father and silently begged a hug. She heaved a single great, wet sob into his shirtfront. 

It was Kitty’s reaction that surprised Barba most, and held his attention longer than the others’. Gone was her glassy-eyed fatalism and trembling lip. She’d hardened, from the set of her jaw to the crook in her arm that allowed her hand to rest against her breast, her oft-worried rosary pinned there with enough force, surely, to bruise either her heart or her hand. 

She stared over her son’s unconscious form, observing with such scrutiny, as if she alone could spot a loose stitch or untended scrape. 

Along with the space was an allotted amount of time. As if Carisi would exhaust himself as the center of attention. Ultimately, neither Barba nor Tommy made the cut as the nurse quietly touched each member of the Carisi family gently on the arm--the universal way of excusing them of their welcome--and ushered them away. 

Barba put pride aside for having been relegated to the outer vestiges from jump, and looked hard for that much-needed break in the bodies shuffling out of the room. Then, with all the finesse of his thirteen-year-old self jumping a subway turnstile, Barba gave himself was he needed.

He permitted himself access. 

Entering at the tail end of the scrum, Barba acted quickly to first look upon Carisi, seeing all that he had from opposite the glass, but _so much worse._

Here, in real-time, Carisi was suspended. His body was a fractured line, an aborted signature on the gingham hospital mattress. 

He was under a powerful anesthetic and couldn’t feel the full depths of the pain he was surely in--that much, Barba knew. This, despite the worried line between his eyes, or the deathly white film on his lips laid in a chalky line that further emphasized how the feature had lost its preferred pink coloring. Barba could scarcely bring himself to view the length of tubing plugged down Carisi’s throat, rigged into place with tape and what looked like the flat lip of a pacifier. He figured it went into some _thing,_ some _where,_ but refused to look.

Instead, Barba was spurned to act impulsively, even selfishly. He shot forth a hand and met Carisi’s form, feeling it first to be as unnaturally still as it looked. Then, with nothing but good sense to stop him, Barba gripped Carisi’s hand and squeezed.

He felt sick when the gesture was not returned.

“Sir--” 

The nurse’s hand came for his forearm, too. 

It wasn't something he'd ever think to do, and certainly hadn't in this instance. The fear of not being given another chance was more permanent in his mind than good sense, and rather than hold his breath or keep composed, Barba did _that,_ and found the dull roar of confirmation to be deafening. 

The rest of Carisi, Barba took in with only his eyes: chest, rising and falling with shallow breaths. Eyes, closed under bruise-swept lids. Limbs, their usual skinny but accounted for. He didn’t know what was going on under the blue-flecked hospital gown or barely-drawn bedsheets. He didn’t know if Carisi’s gut was a pulpy, stapled mess, if there were still openings fixed with little plastic taps incase something needed to be fed in or drained out. He didn’t know what muscle damage would look like on Carisi--never mind that he had seen more crime scene photos than most, and had catalogued enough in his mind to gauge damage when he saw it. Suddenly, he could not align Carisi with those terms, or figure him on that scale. He didn’t fit. His existence was more fixed than that of people who entered Barba’s world, wounded already and often not for the first time.

The last really was something--when Fin said he’d taken a bullet to the arm, some part of Barba wondered, if that was the case, how hadn’t it been blown completely off? There wasn’t a great deal of girth to work with, no spare parts. He gripped Barba well and hard when he leveraged their bodies, could shove him against bedroom doors with enough strength to suggest his intent, but that activity didn’t necessitate brute strength, only strength of his desire. 

Instead, Carisi’s arm had doubled in size under gauze and plaster casting, was raised in some unnatural arch, as if to welcome a revered guest.

The whole of his limb and its accoutrements was perfectly, blindingly white, a fact for which Barba was most astonished. This, for a man who got a papercut and bled such that one would think his finger had been severed at the tip. 

_“Sir.”_

The touch was now a grip, and Barba didn’t argue; he accepted the step back the nurse had wedged between him and the rest of the room. He nodded through her brief explanation about room capacity, and the need for an undisturbed setting, and whatever else she said that sounded both decent and put-upon. For his own, Barba wore his most apologetic face all the while. When she’d finished--and backed him out considerably--Barba introduced himself, throwing his name, face, and a more gentler nature than he felt was genuine into the ring. 

“I’m Rafael Barba.”

“Emergency contact, right.”

“And his partner. And Manhattan Assistant District Attorney.” If she hadn’t glanced up at that, Barba might have resorted to claiming his Elite Plus flyer status, or his credit and LSAT scores. He was relieved, then, for the clocking of that fact, and the nurse’s newfound attention. With all the composure he could muster, Barba sought to leverage her understanding for cooperation.

“So while I understand I may be last in line as far as visiting hours go, rest assured, I will be in line.” Barba felt they were both satisfied with that--but he had to be certain.

“And you are?”

She told him. 

“And your direct supervisor is?”

Barba didn’t hear her answer. 

The nurse he was speaking with-- _interrogating,_ rather--had turned on her heel and reentered Carisi’s room, swiftly closing the door behind her. Her attention was on the small pulse reader that had become dislodged from Carisi’s hand. Everyone seemed to fall silent and watch as she dutifully secured the item, then examined the IV port and adjoining tubing and drip chamber. Finally, she gave a once-over of several surrounding monitors, making more sense than seemed possible of their gentle humming. 

When she exited the room, she gave her silent audience a gentle nod. Then she addressed them by name--Kitty, Dom, Gina, Theresa, Bella--and pointedly, “Rafael Barba.” 

She was a smarter player than he, dropping his name, a perfect egg, on the floor and expecting him to come stand at once in its runny yolk. 

He did. 

They were told a set of rules and restrictions, each craftily worded like an explanation. Schedules and exceptions were detailed, but all Barba could think for hearing it was how those determinations would not set his being there, but that he would simply and inevitably _be there,_ always. He would confront those rules, not rest subservient to them. 

If he’d gotten to sit with Carisi like the family had, Barba wondered if he wouldn’t be more settled into the idea that Carisi was alive, and well enough not to overly concern himself with the alternative. 

But he hadn’t. Because of some idling rule or restriction. 

The whole of them were led around a corner to a nearby seating area, this one homier than the public space on the first floor, side side tables in the two far corners with a plant and succulent pairing, neither drawing much light from the alley-facing view from the windows. 

They stood there for a time, grouped tight together not because the space demanded it, but because none had well and truly left that narrow stretch of hallway outside Carisi’s private room. It wouldn’t do to block passage of the entire hospital corridor, but there was little to be said for bodily autonomy when their loved one was laid so deathly still. They seemed to mimic him in solidarity. 

Stricken with a rare bolt of silence, the Carisis did not speak. They leaned upon one another, alternatively crowning over or sinking into one another, depending on height. They folded together so neatly.

Barba, meanwhile, stood without aid; he did this purposefully. If he allowed himself near a chair or a wall, he would invariably sink. He’d surrender to the heavy descent of his heart, until the pain in his stomach was level with the heel of his shoe. He might even crouch, a stone against redwoods. 

But if he stood, even for being emptied of all the forces that should stir restlessly within him, at least he was level. At least he could be seen and spoken to like a human being, should any deign to approach him. 

Tommy was the first to break into the silence, repeating what they were told about the second surgery planned for Carisi’s arm. 

“Yeah,” Gina answered, her arms still drawn across herself in a necessary hug, like she’d done in the room. “Friday morning, she said.”

Bella spoke next, and though it shouldn’t have, the exhaustion in her voice surprised Barba. Seeing Carisi, watching his chest rise and fall with aided breaths, had done something to rejuvenate him, spurning Barba towards as of yet unknown action. 

Perhaps Bella came away with something else from her visit--less necessity, more patience.

“Tommy and I should go home, check on Bea,” she said. “Mom, dad, you should get some sleep.” 

Theresa picked up where Bella left off: “I can stay the rest of the night.”

Gina sighed. “You have work in the morning--”

“So fuck work. I’ll stay.”

There was some crosstalk, some chastising of Theresa’s language, some of Gina offering her lunch hours, or making an early afternoon of her days at the office. Others chimed in that the afternoon commute would be murder. 

“I can do nights,” Barba heard himself offer. His gaze was fixed on corner they’d come around, as if it was possible for the light to bend and stretch and draw his eye to the closed door to Carisi’s room. “And days. Anytime. I live nearby. I can be here. I will. I--there isn’t anywhere else I have to be.” 

Theresa studied him like she had her brother, but the distance Barba witnessed did not translate here. It wasn’t possible for them to venture further from one another, so she could only come that much closer. 

“Fine,” she said. “You’ll take our numbers. Text or call if they say _anything,_ if _anything_ happens.”

“Yes. Of course.”

Barba answered before realizing it was an order, and Theresa wasn’t hedging her bets on any response. When Barba recognized this, he wasn’t insulted. The insinuation that he might be vindictive and territorial with any insights he might gain--because he had every reason to be--did not unsettle his offer. Rather, he was relieved they all saw what he did, and how he saw it: that idling future where Carisi was okay hung before them, twisting on a narrow thread. They couldn’t rush it, or stand in its direct shadow, hoping to intercept its fall. As if they feared startling an unwanted outcome, they plotted around it, made plans to appear normal, even as their behaviors became more and more contrived. 

It was why Barba had long refused to undress himself of his tie. No matter how inconsequential the deed, he feared upsetting that delicate sense of balance between what was necessary and what only felt that way.

The family hugged those had had to depart: Tommy and Bella, Gina. Theresa plopped herself down in one of the plush waiting room chairs, commencing her vigil. 

Barba, for not seeing himself in context of the broader room, did not at once recognize he was left standing with Dom and Kitty, none of them certain as to what move to make. Barba _wanted_ to step outside. He needed air, felt choked for it. He’s wanted to step outside and be surprised to see daylight, or substantial snow--something to speak definitively for the hours they’d been spent spinning inside their own selves.

He supposed he could give himself an excuse to leave, and thought about Carisi’s surprise bad habit. Barba hadn’t lied when he said he’d never been much for a smoker. There had been caffeine and sex and scotch, in varying measure, and not much variation. Anything else had been a passing fancy.

Barba decided that was settled, life was _pronounced,_ and he was free to put his mind towards things within his control. Purpose glided down his back like streat, reached for his fingers and toes, then stiffened, and hung from him like an ornament. He was outfitted with it, dressed entire in its glimmering worth. 

Only with that bit of confirmation--weak as it was, weak as _Carisi_ was, held together and laid up in a bed that was not his own--could Barba heave himself up and begin to prepare, to plan. It was that Catholic upbringing of his, as well as an early life spent in a hushed state of poverty, that was responsible for his warping happiness into superstition, and superstition into emotional protectionism. 

He retreated from Carisi’s weakened form stronger, set now for a fight Carisi couldn’t so much as open his eyes to, let alone raise his fists. Barba would do that. With one arm flung back to shield his partner, Barba would wage that battle.

_“Theresa, help your mom find the Ladies’, would you?”_

Barba overhead bits of tinny conversation, and before he’d looked around to confirm, he and Dom were alone. He went forth flat-footed and certain, even for taking those steps across a ten-stories raised circus wire. 

“Dom,” Barba started, a touch too loud and pronounced for an attempt to gain the attention of someone who was scarcely two feet away. “There was a man who introduced himself to you earlier. From the NYPD, but not a cop…” 

Dom frowned. It was a gesture only scarcely more distinct than the expression he’d worn all night. 

“Sure.”

“Please,” Barba began, and in his own voice heard a dangling thread of enthusiasm wary of flame-licking disaster, “Be careful talking to him. To anyone.” 

Barba knew he was only a breath away from raving.

He took that breath and put it to good use, giving an example to make his warnings less unmanageable. 

“Have you spoken with Sonny’s union rep?”

“I don’t… what’s there to say, beyond speculation?”

Barba wet his lips. His task was not only to convince Dom of the very existence of the danger they faced regarding dictation of--and recourse to--Carisi’s well-being, but of its imminence. 

“Intent. Yours, Sonny’s. I can have a word, bring them in to speak with you, sit in on that meeting…” Barba worried about overstepping, but when he thought of all that could spiral out of his control of he didn’t manage things now, didn’t put placeholders in the thoughts or beliefs others might have, the answer was clear. Systems were in place to overtake any opportunity left untended, and doubting that would leave them stranded. 

Barba could picture it now: the whole of them, shouldering little more than a parasol during a thunderstorm. 

“They want to help him, but there’s a complication. The shooter… they want to help him, too.” Barba hoped he was heard. The Roberts’ hadn't needed his explanation, which was a tragedy on its face, but thanks to their own savvy and pain, Barba had been spared. It was a much-needed out, because he hadn't been in so consummate a state as to give every bitter word without coming apart. 

“What I want--what I think we all want--is to be prepared. We should confer with those representing the other victims. One was a just a kid, trying to help. The other may have been guilty of a crime, but no one cop has the authority to sentence him to death.”

Barba swallowed, wetness gliding over the lump in his throat. 

“Maybe Sonny’s shooting was accidental. Chances are that’s entirely the case. But--” And here, Barba wondered absently if the strained grip of his voice on his own words was the fault of the tenuous relationship he had with his patience being little less than a choke hold, “--But the only reason why that might be is because Office Taylor saw two unarmed black men, saw them running, and decided to fire every round in his weapon.”

He thought of the Roberts, who didn’t have to make such awful calculations. The only upside to having lost everything, he supposed. 

“It could be very important for them if we reserve our right to make any decisions, any statements, now.”

It was the past day’s task to grapple with feelings of horror and disgust, all of it coming into striking clarity. A day had dawned. 

There was no more time for evasive maneuvers. If it was one second more, it was a lifetime spent denying Carisi in every conceivable way. 

Indifference--not obfuscation--was the enemy. 

Barba squared his shoulders, stiffened his resolve. 

“Sonny would agree with me.” 

Barba didn't doubt this. But more than that, he believed Dom should take him at his word, and know it that way, if by no other means.

Dom shifted his weight some, as if considering Barba’s statements was a whole-body affair. He looked over one shoulder to ensure privacy.

“What are we talking about, here.” 

He didn’t lower his voice. He wasn’t so taken in by Barba’s distant nod towards conspiracy, and Barba couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or not. Was he wary of all proclamations, or was he already decided one way, and at a pace down some narrow blue line? 

For his own, Barba met him halfway: his voice didn’t waver in certitude or volume, but he tipped forward, a breath’s width, to have his say.

“I want Officer Taylor prosecuted for his behavior. I want to classify his actions as criminal and not merely negligent. There are two dead men. Sonny could have easily been a third.” The anger and disenchantment Barba felt deep inside screamed to have a louder voice, and clawed at his face and throat in protest. Barba felt both going red as a result. 

“That’s,” he stopped, seeing himself on that precipice between the safety afforded to him amidst the pretension of theory, and unfathomable pain realized.

_Say it._

_Name it._

“...not so far from a mass shooting for my liking.”

He couldn’t help but tame himself; he’d trained all his adult life to hedge and score points where he could, rather than risk it all. 

But it writhed under his skin, how close they’d come to tipping that particular scale. Barba imagined Carisi flicked it, falling back, the toe of a boot or the tip of a finger craning outward, knocking those great tides and sending them sloshing back and forth, as if the outcome were inconsequential. 

Barba now knew the best way to expel the creatures that got to him: corner it in a box, choke it with questions, tear its walled defense into shredded excuses, _make it answerable to the whole of society._

Barba wasn’t obtuse; he had this ability because his job title allowed him to speak coolly in hallowed halls, rather than scream himself hoarse on city blocks. Though, he understood the appeal of both.

Dom, he was coming to learn, still refused to see.

“I don’t understand… what,” Dom opened his hands, then slowly gestured as if to stop Barba from steamrolling a piece of heavy machinery over him. 

“It’s just--it’s answering questions. The right way. When they’re asked.” Barba hoped he didn’t sound as condescending as he felt. “This is something I can do. Please let me.” 

Barba went in search of another approach. Longer, now, and in turns through clear open fields and narrow paths crowded with brush. He started slowly, begging Dom to follow. 

“It’s beyond compensation. Sonny is owed opportunities to return to work, of course, if he wants. If he’s able.” Barba looked at Dom, blatantly searching. Dom had seen Carisi longer than he had, and perhaps he was better equipped to make that judgement. 

“I’ll speak with his representative. I’ll get him outside counsel if I think their approach is lacking, or they’re compromising his rights to avoid a PR nightmare.”

Dom took a left: “You think they’d do that?”

Barba doubled back: “I think any organization wants to minimize bad press.” 

Dom lapped him: “At the cost of a young man’s well-being?”

Barba stood alone in a clearing: “Yes. Emphatically.” 

Discomfort ran itself up and down Dom’s legs, and he shifted again, looked around again, did all the pacing tasks one ever did when they sought assurance and calm from circumstances that did not allow for them. 

“Isn’t it a little early for this kind of talk?”

Thinking of Bradley Lambert and his polished shoes and unsettling gaze--a thing he imagined operated sympathy on a dimmer switch--Barba was resolute: “Not so early that he isn’t already here.” 

Something like acceptance broke across Dom’s face. It flashed plain and then sank back into his more defined features, tucking into the bags under his eyes and the lines around his mouth. 

“They’re going to make offers when he wakes up, or--before.” Barba oriented himself back down the path he’d started. “They’re going to sound generous. They’ll talk up his pension and claim it’s for a limited time only. Accepting anything may limit his recourse, here. I’m urging caution.”

He arrived at his point, believing he had Dom in close enough proximity to witness it, too.

“What is said here will reflect back on what was done. That’s just a fact. If we’re not mindful, we run the risk of influencing the case for the other two victims.”

Dom was already shaking his head, and Barba knew he was close to losing him entirely. Parts of him were far-flung and long gone, but there had always been enough to grab hold of. Barba had known that since that morning, when he’d heard Dom’s voice change and correct itself on the phone. There were threads of frustration, of doubt, of uncertainty--all prime to be knotted together or dispersed, depending on who arrange them first, and how.

“This was an accident. A terrible accident. I don’t think Sonny wants to go to court--”

“And if the alternative is a man walks after shooting three people, killing two, would Sonny want that?” Barba no longer feared getting heated and argumentative; these were simple truths now, simpler than most he and Carisi had dealt with in recent weeks. 

If Barba’s only issue was explaining them to a father, he could overcome that deficiency. Speaking of Carisi, genuinely, and for what was best for him, was Barba’s cause du jour. Only now, in the man’s absence, did it seem as charitable as Barba had always envisioned, but come so short. 

Now, he soared.

“He would want what’s right. We don’t know how that will look, yet, but in a couple days we will have a better understanding. Trust me. Or just--wait for his say-so. Please. At least that.” 

Barba sought Dom’s gaze and fixed his own to it. He moved and shifted as Dom did. Any attempt to sway his attention would have to be as definitive as a snapped neck; he would not surrender for anything less. 

Kitty joined them, looking like she’d washed her face and tried to comb her fingers through her air, both to little effect. Barba felt her presence as though she’d arrived breathing down the back of his neck, a resurrected ghost. Her presence did that for him more and more--unsettled his nerves, made him question what was seen and known for what might have been. He had to remind himself to get used to a little haunting: she hadn’t gone anywhere, and likely wouldn’t stray now. 

“You two are staying in the city, I presume?”

Kitty fit her hand into her husbands. Barba noticed it had instinctively moved towards her and opened.

“We’ll get a hotel,” Dom said, breaking his gaze with Barba to nod at Kitty.

“You’re welcome to stay at my apartment,” Barba said, and suddenly heard his voice for soft and genial, as though he genuinely wanted to be believed. “I live nearby. There’s a guest room.”

That was a lie, flicked easily off Barba’s tongue because that’s what _Carisi_ called the small room off the kitchen. ‘A room with a bed,’ was even a stretch, because the mattress he’d ordered with two clicks, so marketed to that urbane class of Manhattanites who could blithely make what was billed in stores as an investment, was still in its box. Carisi relentlessly teased Barba about this, the most responsible drunken online purchase imaginable, with Barba insisting what he’d wanted all along was truth in advertising, and he’d gotten that. 

“Sonny would--he’d like that.” 

_He’d want me to offer,_ Barba didn’t say. _He’d be shocked if you accepted._

He noticed Kitty had a plastic bag under her arm. It wasn’t soaked-through and heavy with bloodied clothes--Barba imagined they had to cut his belongings to shreds, and keep them for evidence besides--but there were a few items weighing down one plastic corner. 

“Did they give you his things--?” 

In the plastic bag were Carisi’s phone and keys. An errant touch by Kitty’s index finger to the phone awoke the screen, on which Barba featured. He held his breath, seeing it even upside down and slanted at an odd angle. For every set of eyes that found and clocked the display, none spoke a word of it.

 _What was there to say, even,_ was Barba’s realistic take, but lowered expectations didn’t stop him from feeling his chest pound as he scribbled his address on his business card and handed it to Dom. After a moment’s hesitation, he pointed out the key on Carisi’s meager keyring. There were only three to choose from: his apartment, Barba’s, and his locker at work.

“Even if you just want to collect some things of his. For when he wakes up,” Barba said. “Because--that’s where they are.” Then, “We’ve talked about moving in together. Spring, we were thinking.”

He was letting them know--if they _wanted to know_ \--the details of their son’s life weren’t so cloistered, so secretive, that Barba couldn’t share them, himself. It was a life lived more out in the open than not, a life that hung on keyrings, that read in black and white on hospital documents, that flickered across television screens. 

_If you want to know,_ Barba seemed to be saying, _here is the way._

Barba knew what his sudden inclination towards sharing was really about: evidence. He knew the value of placing himself in Carisi’s life in the hopes that they wouldn’t remove him from the decisions pertaining to its quality.

It was shrewd, but Barba didn’t think twice. 

“Stop by anytime.”

-

Barba lingered about the hospital, stalking hallways to better orient himself, and making Carisi’s room his sole point of reference. He stood outside the lavender room, trying to decide whether or not the color was ruined for him now, if it would be soon. He crossed paths with Benson, whose presence had slipped his mind. She’d been running interference, leaving Barba and the family be, and keeping whatever appraisals he was party to quiet, out of the hands of calls and texts from newspapers and her higher-ups alike. 

The hour grew late, then early, then--most impossibly--seemed to stall. There would be more waiting--this much, Barba was promised--but there was time, he was told, to “see to things.”

“What things,” Barba had asked when a nurse grew tired of his approaches and inquires. 

“A change a clothes? A shower?”

Leaving the hospital without Carisi, with only _assurances_ of Carisi, and wearing the coat he hadn’t had when he arrived, was as strange and disorienting an experience as Barba had ever known. He felt as though he’d been inturned to the hospital waiting room as opposed to arriving there, and dismissed now though his term was not up. 

Benson found him standing just outside the hospital double doors. Barba didn’t question how. Head down--suddenly he was exhausted--he told her what Carisi had looked like, what he’d caught in a glimpse. 

Benson’s hand was at his back, but he stepped out of it as soon as he took it for a comfort. 

“I’ll walk,” he said, spying at once that she was hailing him a cab. 

The hand came down without argument. 

“I’ll walk you,” she said. Her voice sang with a gentleness that put Barba’s teeth on edge.

“I don’t need you to,” he huffed, and really--it was that. Childish and mean, and deliberately so. “I don’t _want--”_

“Okay,” Benson interrupted, speaking in his stead, so that he wouldn’t go on to say something he’d regret. “Just--I’ll pick up when you call. And you’ll do the same?”

Barba nodded. He’d stepped so far from the light of the hospital, and by extension Benson, that he wasn’t certain he was seen. He worked a ‘thank you’ past his lips, but wasn’t certain he was heard, either. 

He walked home--not a route he’d taken from this exact location, but a way he knew nonetheless. The hospital was an easy landmark, shooting up higher than the leafy trees and stately brownstones that marked a well-off neighborhood. It had history, and with that came money, though Barba knew by virtue of a terribly good Turkish cafe that he wasn’t the first splash of color to make it past the metaphoric ivory gates. 

He thought the walk would help clear his head, thought the cold might invigorate him, if only to force through his veins the total realization of exhaustion, once the mild warmth of his apartment building engulfed him. He’d been broken, that much was said and done. What remained now was the recognition laid bare across his body. 

And repair--one day, maybe in some distant summer, and only if he was lucky enough. 

Because as it stood under snow and pelted-white lamplight under the awning of his apartment building, neither clarity nor sense came to pass, and so he arrived home feeling wound up and uneasy. 

He told the doorman there might be visitors, but he ran into difficulty trying to explain them. 

_My partner’s parents. The Carisis. Dom and Kitty._

Even for being truthful, no such sentiment felt sincere. 

Barba concerned himself with that as a personal failure for a long, quiet moment held suspended in the elevator.

Time swept by him, glancing his form and parting for it. Barba watched it stretch out ahead of him, and knew there would be no catching up. 

He ducked into his apartment, opened then closed then locked the door, as was his practice. It was a strange time to be there and not be asleep; the place was dark, and beneath that immaculate, just as he’d left it that morning. 

But his expectations of the space had changed drastically. He couldn’t look into his bedroom and determine if Carisi had been there, changed clothes, maybe taken a nap atop Barba’s bed, thinking so long as he didn’t put himself between the sheets he wasn’t committing to sleep. Barba couldn’t expect Carisi to have swept in to assemble some miniature feast atop the limited countertop space. He couldn’t trace their path from the kitchen to the bedroom, couldn’t find anything that smelled sweetly of their bodies, cologne and not, coming together. 

His life--as it had come to be over the past year with Carisi--was gone. 

He was tired, worried, and terribly lonely--conclusions that met in one tidy sum, that this was his life as it had been before Carisi. Its resurrection came on strong, even for missing him but a day. Barba supposed he’d set himself up for that particular failure; his life, by design, was bereft of relationships and all the associated lows and triumphs. It was streamlined, absent the flourishes made by someone else’s hand, someone whose adoration he’d taken deep into his heart, then taken wholly for granted.

And it hurt, having worked that muscle only to have it atrophy in mere hours. 

Empty-handed, Barba shed his coat and shoes, then flicked on the lights before making a b-line to the guest bedroom--“the bed’s room”--and surveying what he could make of what he’d promised. 

He rolled up his shirtsleeves before undoing the buttons and taking it off entirely. The space was mostly empty, and didn’t really acquire him to look the part of the effort he was making, but Barba was grateful for the distraction.

He shifted a few boxes of books--his own, displaced when Carisi’s collection encroached like a storm over well-tended farmlands--into the closet, and threw down a rug that was intended for the room but never unfurled after being rolled and taped up during his last move.

He stared at its vibrant royal blue fibers, patterned with great bursts of gold and red-orange, swells of fall colors darted in as spring’s finest blooms. A fixture of his old apartment, he hadn’t seen it in almost a year. He wondered if he liked it still before correcting himself-- _of course he did,_ it was gorgeous and cost a small fortune. Any of his reasons for not wanting to see it could be overturned and unveiled as excuses in one afternoon’s appointment with his therapist.

Barba cleared his throat in the empty room. Who was going to pick a fight with him at two in the morning was anybody’s guess. 

He set up his phone on a small desk, creating a makeshift lean-to with a few paperback novels for a better angle. He supposed he didn’t know how to begin, really, and in his uncertainty gave a little flourish of his hands--something he hoped might make Carisi smile when he saw it.

As soon as Carisi had quit making fun of the purchase, he’d made Barba swear not to unpack the bed without him. Barba’s response had been a curt “whatever” between kisses, but that was a promise made.

“Sorry,” Barba said to the empty room.

With the frame in place, setting up the bed was a brief and painless ordeal. Barba made a face for the camera; it wasn’t that he’d expected something more cinematic, but _maybe…_

“It came out of the box,” he announced. “As advertised.”

He fitted it with clean linens and for more time than he’d spent assembling the thing, he frowned over the fact that the sheets clashed with the rug. He stopped the recording, worried now he’d only filmed himself looking terribly inept and lonely. He considered trying to fit the damn mattress back into its impossible selling point, and make a brighter, better second showing. 

He sat on the bed and checked that the video had recorded. He looked like a fool, but couldn’t help but smile at the thought of showing Carisi. _See, I remembered. I remember everything you ask of me. I keep a list._

Barba weighed the odds he'd start crying, more alone now because there shouldn’t have been any reason to keep Carisi from sitting right beside him, taking part in this menial task. He supposed the effort might do to exhaust him, but he couldn’t swing it. Barba found himself on the verge, but wasn’t one to go careening into wracking-sobs and fitful tears, even if his chest tightened and his heart ached for exactly that. Some internal mechanism kept drawing him back, fastening the valve, stifling the execution.

Sitting on a whole bed in his tiny apartment guestroom, having for himself zero intention of sleeping in his own bed until it was filled again with a man he thought so terrifyingly about loving, was perhaps as awful and lonely a situation as Barba had known in his entire life. Worse than being a friendless child. Worse than having friends and realizing they might come to know him, and the latter would revoke the former. Worse than parents who beat and soothed, beat and soothed, beat and soothed, until his whole body racked with the cacophony of disregard and apology. 

Worse than being known, loved, forgiven, and betrayed. 

Worse than being successful, brilliant, cunning, and despised. 

Worse than being wanted, and not being sure how to feel about that.

Barba buried his head in his hands. It was holding himself like this--unnaturally, in ways no one else did because it wasn’t particularly comforting, or helpful, or seemly--that made him realize this wasn’t how he mourned, much less fretted. He was better suited to staring hard at nothing, a pen in hand--or a drink--thinking about the problem until arriving at a solution, a compromise, or grudging acceptance. Anything more felt disingenuous. 

Barba _wanted_ more. He wanted to expel what was inside him, all the pain and anguish and tumultuous fear. He couldn’t do that holding two fingers of scotch in a crystal glass. 

(Barba didn’t know it, because he hadn’t looked at himself in a mirror, but he looked every bit as wretched and ruined as he felt. It was held in his brow and under, encircling his eyes, draining them of light and movement and--perhaps the greatest theft--expression. He was zombified by grief--a fact he could not glean of himself, for not having the energy to be curious. His sadness pierced him, two identical spears lodging him in place with fixtures as narrow as toothpicks and as sturdy as steel. To ask for more was to call himself Sebastian and pledge sainthood.)

Upon finding the raw, unfiltered release of tears unforthcoming, Barba took a shower instead. 

It was there, surrounded by slick, steam-touched walls and his own company that Barba attempted to remember what still felt so sudden, he thought he might take a wrong step back and walk into it. 

His plans to amass any and all information had been short-lived. Even for knowing Carisi was out of surgery, that his condition was stable, Barba regretted the blind spots he had regarding the circumstances that put him there. He had from Fin and Rollins a certain perspective. There was Fin’s strict storytelling, the things he pushed forward and those he excluded. Barba often trusted the man’s discretion, but he doubted those instincts, now. 

He tried to reason with himself: what _else_ could he have gathered from the blood mottling Rollins’ jacket sleeves in a vile life-or-death grip pattern, the wet spots on her knees and down her shins, the bits of gravel still hugging the denim? What he could have asked of her hands, because they’d been pink and shaking, neither due to the cold.

What could he have asked about the flecks of blood crusting in the sweep of her bangs? 

Maybe she didn’t have all the answers, but she had a story.

He closed his eyes and tried to revisit feeling like he’d seen everything.

His chest felt hollow, his legs weak, for the thought.

He remembered, somewhere near the six-hour mark, feeling like Carisi was missing, that all the cops gathered in the waiting room should be out looking for him. 

_Derelict in their duties yet again,_ Barba thought, and let the water carry the shampoo out of his hair.

Between that and fresh clothes, he dozed on his couch for a few hours, awaking with a face full of uncomfortable sunlight. 

He showered again for smelling stale, brushed his teeth and tongue to overcome the taste of two fingers of scotch he didn’t remember drinking last night, then dressed in a simple charcoal suit, absent a tie or suspenders. His morning took him back to his office, but only briefly, and for the sole purpose of speaking with the ADAs who had taken over his open cases. 

Everyone he dropped in on looked surprised for his being there, but didn’t ask after what they all undoubtedly knew. Their chats were brief, courteous and professional, despite Barba having gone in with every intention of filling every gap, answering every question, and combatting every suggestion, determined as he was--still--to win on his terms. Questions and gaps were not forthcoming. His colleagues knew--perhaps better than he did--that they had Carmen for that. 

And whether it was kindness or fear that stalled them, no one put forth any eager _suggestions._

Barba surmised that they were all very polite.

He meant to avoid his own office, but his mind, foggy with thoughts of a man clear across town, stole him down that familiar path. Carmen met him professionally--“Mr. Barba”--and embraced him only after he’d closed the door after him. 

Tears overwhelmed her almost immediately, but Barba, feeling too spent to offer anything of himself, could not stifle them with words or sounds, much less touch. Carmen calmed herself like she did all things--quietly, masterfully, and with enviable elegance. 

“The news…” she began. “There’s video.”

“Good,” Barba said, then winced. 

“I watched it.”

She said as much so Barba wasn’t alone in feeling craven and opportunistic. She said as much so Barba would know he didn’t have to do the same. 

He gave a weak smile in response. They both knew better. 

Carmen sent him on his way with a cup of coffee, which he accepted in exchange for his word to call with news, or if he needed anything at all. He couldn’t quite look her in the eye. After her admission, he feared seeing a very particular curiosity twist into her brow or thin the line of her lips. He worried, if for seeing the shooting, she might look at him with wonder, thinking, _How could Carisi **possibly** be okay?_

“Anything,” she pressed, and smoothed his hair back. Barba realized he didn’t remember if he’d combed it or not. He couldn’t remember looking at himself in the mirror--he hadn’t shaved, and he’d brushed his teeth staring at his empty bedroom. He felt his face burn with embarrassment. 

She took a step back from him, allowing a professional distance they both knew hadn’t existed for some time. 

Carmen breached the space again--what was once more over the wall?--and straightened his collar. 

“There,” she said firmly. “Perfect.” 

Barba left the court house and walked a ways, eventually hailing a cab because traffic could afford him much the same time to pause and consider where he ought to be going. 

The weather seemed to have come to a standstill: it was neither bitterly cold nor rotten with snow. The horizon was still absent, swept up in that pale light that blurred the edges of the city and took the tops of buildings clean off. Barba decided to swing by his apartment and drop off his recently-retrieved briefcase before returning to the hospital, and cut his ride short when the slow drum of traffic no longer suited his needs. 

He hoped walking would help settle his restless thoughts, but half a block in he realized he didn’t seem to have any. He felt distant from his own body, numb to his own mind. 

Perhaps cruelly--because when would he next enjoy a moment absent of excruciatingly clear heartache?--he tried to imagine what he was in for: the coming days, seeing Carisi only as a slim figure washed out by hospital bedsheets, IVs drawn into his arm, his body broken and moved like a doll’s. How long could he stare at and count the tiny scrapes on Carisi’s fingertips, where he’d crushed them into the ground, digging against the earth in an effort to sit up, to abandon his reality?

It did the trick, and the closer Barba came to his apartment building, the angrier he felt. Carisi’s state was proof of a great many things, but one in particular for which Barba felt solely responsible: he and Carisi were undisciplined in their love. They were in turns too lazy and too deliberate, acting as they pleased, whenever love inspired them. Domesticity found them on weeknights, hunger threw them into bed, attitudes tore them apart or swung them wide, then hard, back into one another. 

They didn’t have routine, and even as their love flourished it was prone to plateauing, lying still as if to bake under its incomparable warmth. It wasn’t strong enough to _be_ enough, at all times. 

Barba thought, if it were, _if he’d made it so,_ perhaps he could have been ready. Better still, he could have been preemptive. He could have loved hard and long and sure enough so as to steal Carisi from his other passions. Carisi, certainly, had presented himself as willing to accept as much. 

_If I had even tried…_

How could this have happened, otherwise?

The buzz of his phone stole Barba’s attention. He’d been able to ignore the thing well enough while waiting the previous day--he was closer to a source of information than not, then. But now, out on the sidewalk, under the open sky, he had reason to feel alarmed. 

The latest text wasn’t from any Carisi, or even Benson, and nothing newsworthy besides. It was from Dr. Huang, and Barba assumed it was another line of well-wishing, much in the vein of all he’d received the previous day. 

Huang wrote, _[I know Dr. Allan Rishi. He’s very accomplished and won’t bullshit you on the odds. Detective Carisi is in good hands.]_

The message was formal, but only in the ways needed to showcase where it wasn’t. There really was a gay cabal, Barba thought. _Won’t Sonny be pleased._

Barba hung back at the street corner, and stepped flush with a building so as to free up the sidewalk for others shuffling by, absent any world-changing personal dramas of their own. His thumb grazed across his phone’s screen, and before he had given any thought as to why, Barba chose to call Huang in response to his text.

“Rafael, hello.” Some platitude followed, perfectly attuned to the man’s gentle disposition. Barba would have liked to hear it, were it not for the ringing in his ears.

“How are you?”

Huang may have repeated himself, Barba realized, due to his silence. He answered back in a rush: “I--I’m sorry, I don’t know why I called.” 

“That’s fine,” Huang replied, with a gentleness Barba wanted to despise, but couldn’t, not even for show. “You sound--you’ve gotten some good news?”

“He’s alive,” Barba said, and found he did not tire of sharing this one, solitary piece of information. “And the doctors are talking about his recovery, so…”

Hearing him trail off, the doctor allowed, “It’s only natural to still be worried, even doubtful.” 

“I could probably breathe a little easier if I believed it, though. If I let myself--believe it.”

“Probably.” 

“Probably something I should work on with the therapist I’m actually paying to see.”

Barba knew that tiny, self-satisfied smirk Huang preferred to natural human emotion had made an appearance. 

“I won’t go muddying someone’s hard work,” he said by way of agreement. 

They said more to one another, but Barba forgot the words as soon as he’d formed them. He supposed Huang would understand, would excuse him for not being his consummate self. There was a reason Benson revered his company and considered him a friend, his questionable expertise in the courtroom excluded: he was as considerate and forgiving a soul as she could be in her best moments. 

“You can go to Olivia for anything,” Huang was saying, as if he’d peeked at Barba’s own thoughts and sought to capitalize on them. “It’s the truth, and she’d want someone to remind you.” 

“And I suppose it was either you or a flock of trained pigeons,” Barba muttered, feeling tired now for being told things he knew. He hedged, then, saying, “You’re not…”

Huang beat him to the punch: “I am law enforcement.”

“You’re not only that,” Barba corrected. “Clearly, or we wouldn’t have had to meet in opposition over the likes of _Lewis Hodda.”_ Barba spat the name, and hoped Huang felt remorse for his part in further muddying a guilty man’s path to justice. Barba was able to return to the case with the surviving victim, and Dr. Huang did not reprise his role as an expert witness a second time. 

“You know why I can’t go to her.”

“I know right now you feel you might blame her--”

“Right now I _do._ ”

“No, Rafael. Right now you’re scared.”

People kept using that word--his mother crowned it upon the Carisis, Rollins took it upon herself. Benson embodied it when she hugged Barba--consoling him or herself, he wasn’t so sure anymore.

“I’m angry.”

“Emotions aren’t mutually exclusive.” 

“That the kind of wisdom they had to fly you out to the midwest to dispense?” 

Huang didn’t reply. His silence wasn’t fraught or telling; Barba knew he was wholly unperturbed by the snide insults. He was, of all things, exploiting the patience he’d cultivated over an illustrious career. 

It won him the game, at least. Barba muttered another word of thanks for the insight on Dr. Rishi. Huang reiterated his higher points about seeking comfort, not solace, that the distinction was narrow, but deep--a proverbial chasm. 

_Not solace._

Neither of them chimed in, _Not yet, anyway._

The morning was cool and light. Barba would have liked to sleep in and awake to it, Carisi tucked in under his arm, not even awake but already complaining for the cold. 

Absent that bliss, but remiss to return to an empty apartment--however briefly--Barba felt compelled to bear the elements. He stuck his neck out a little from the loose grip of his scarf, let the air kiss his skin until his cheeks felt bright and wind-chafed. 

Reality couldn’t touch him here. Sidewalks and building fronts weren’t where he and Carisi lived their lives. Even if the alternative of stuffy offices and crowded precincts wasn’t ideal, it was what they knew. Their steps were more assured there, their places buttressed by their knowledge and experience. Bedrooms and hotels came after--with knowledge and experience, too--as well as coffee shops and restaurants, as each man inched the other out into the world on dates and excursions. 

Streets felt like the interim. A means to an end. 

_But then again--_

Barba had kissed Carisi the first night he brought him to his new apartment. They’d walked _these_ streets together, Carisi encouraging Barba to feel at home, Barba all the more convinced he’d never feel that way again. 

Eventually the neighborhood became familiar, and with it--Carisi, as a frequent guest. 

Barba turned away from his thoughts and focused on the cold. Exposing his hands to it, he tried to read and answer texts and e-mails. A few were work-related, with platitudes covering requests and inquiries. One from DA Jack McCoy read only, _[Take time and be well]_ with his personal phone number below that. It was a number Barba was already in possession of, but the invitation here to call was new. 

Another e-mail, from just a half hour ago, bore the subject line: _Howell Roberts Jr._

Barba’s thumb hovered there, giving himself a moment to agonize not over whether he would read the letter, but just how grossly unprepared he was for its message. 

He still didn’t know his place in all this, with the Roberts’ in particular. How would they be framed in the same shot for television cameras--Barba as their dutiful champion in court? Or would they stand side-by-side, panned to as a selection of victims who had all lost a life so essential to the prosperity and continuation of their own? 

Or would he be a more astute player, aligning himself noticeably with Carisi’s interests, making his moves from within the confines of that protective blue wall? 

Barba dismissed the thought; he’d never get past the gates.

If he came to a conclusion--if he could--to what end was it applicable? And for what fucking good, if Carisi wasn’t squarely in frame, playing dual victim and survivor?

Barba knew better than to hope. Knew without thinking it through, which was why his first impulse still felt right, no matter how messy and contentious. 

Reading the Roberts’ email, Barba realized they’d taken to heart his guidance, and drawn from it more composure than Barba had, in the moment, been capable of portraying. They’d sought counsel, and there it was agreed: waiting would feel impossible, but it would assure a stronger case, because the lifeless body of their son wasn’t proof enough of a crime. It was nothing they did not already know, just framed in such flowery language to render the sentiment putrid. Justice would never greet them plainly; it was a secret handshake. They would hurt longer, harder.

Their pain would be held up in a mirror, and the likes of Barba and Calhoun, or better still--civil rights attorney Louis Henderson, who they mentioned in their e-mail--would bring that shaken image to the world and ask of its millions of sleeping inhabitants, could you bear this?

_We had a long discussion with Ms. Calhoun._

Barba skimmed that section. 

_\--returned our call at three in the morning--_

_\--talking ever since--_

He was thankful their message appeared to be appraising him of their situation, not asking for his insights or direction. He couldn’t offer as much, yet. He hardly knew which way was up when he stood.

At the end, they offered the carefully crafted sentiment: _We hope your partner is lucky in all the ways our son was not. Genuinely, from the bottom of our hearts, we hope you are spared._

Barba wrote back thin lines of _thank you_ and _I’m sorry_ and ultimately, that most painful truth: _We will have more to discuss once I am given an answer._

He deleted it all. _Crass,_ he chided himself. _Heartless._

And entirely too possible.

He tried again, writing, _...I’m glad you brought up Mr. Henderson. He would be a strong advocate, and I apologize for not mentioning him myself. When we’ve worked the same case from our respective places, we’ve had some success._

No need, Barba decided, to mention that besides a stunning grand jury indictment, he’d also come away from that case with a year’s worth of death threats, culminating in his attempted murder. There were still the fourteen counts to consider. 

Barba admitted, because their letter felt formal and he wondered if that wasn’t a result of their doubting his commitment to them, _I was sincere in my offer._

And, _More than you know, I appreciate your patience. I will reach out to your family when my position is--_

Barba hesitated. More clear? Determined? 

_\--decided._

It sounded somehow _worse_ than his earlier attempt, but Barba supposed there was no way around it. 

He gave his cell number--another oversight--then sent the email and left the relative wilderness of the sidewalk for the quiet refrain of his apartment building. 

It was still morning, and Barba felt as though he was walking along the edge of some timeless space. People had awoken and gone, already, to flood the subways and sink into the backs of taxis, cramped at first, then open in swarms on some other building. The whole complex felt hollowed-out, purged of life. Barba took the stairs just to hear his own footsteps echo in the narrow corridor, to mimic a little company. 

It was unnecessary.

There were two pairs of winter boots stood outside Barba’s apartment door, lined up, toes out, as though visitors were propped up in them still. Barba stared, listless, at the empty wealth of wall before he was certain they weren't.

Dom and Kitty had actually taken him up on his offer. 

The realization left Barba pitifully aware that he had not anticipated this, _not even for a second._ Opening his home to Carisi’s Italian-American, sixty-something, ardently Catholic parents was so audacious a thing when he said it that Barba had assumed they'd all collectively dismissed him for insane with grief. 

But here they were, winter-braced shoes politely outside his door, coats likely on the hanger, and them, in socked-feet, tiptoeing about. 

Perhaps they’d come solely out of curiosity, though Barba supposed necessity had better odds. They were exhausted, and here was a key palmed into their hands to a place that might carry some semblance of their son. So of course they'd come, twice checked the address, awkwardly spoken with the doorman, and let themselves in--

Barba caught and stamped out the thought before it had time to fully form. _Intruders._

He thought about adding his shoes to the line, but this was his home, and New York besides. They'd go on the discrete rack by the door.

To be polite, he moved their shoes inside as well. Because what if all of Carisi’s wildest dreams were on some slow trajectory towards reality, and there was some hope for his parents growing fond of Barba, except for this: their shoes getting stolen right from outside his door. 

Sure, Barba was older, a lapsed Catholic, and a _man,_ but _inconsiderate?_

He quietly made the switch, though his apartment wasn’t so tricky in its layout that he wasn’t able to clock his visitors and their activity.

The guest room door was closed save for a crack, and the soft, slow breathing emitting there suggested Dom was asleep. Kitty was impossible to miss: sat by the window, staring out into the room with a furrowed brow, as if she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Tasteful furniture, a crowded--but _tidy_ \--bookcase, an extensive record collection. This was shades of her son, this was his quiet tendencies offset by his ever-running mouth--a thing stirred by company, which folded and put itself away when he ached for solitude. This, she supposed, was the man he’d always wanted to be, but not the boy she knew. 

She saw evidence of her son running an elaborate, parallel life to the one she’d known. 

She saw the instigator of that game. 

Kitty wordlessly watched Barba enter his own home, moving with an unnatural care that belied his unease with his guests. 

Barba and Kitty made eye contact from across the room. Barba gave a weak nod and went about removing his coat and setting his briefcase on the table. He’d intended to shower _again,_ shave--he still hadn't--and change before returning to the hospital to await any news. Now, he was considering feigning forgotten files and making a hasty escape.

Seeing Kitty in the simple, classic wears of what had once promised to be a lazy, uninspired morning was what changed his mind. She was less intimidating without her uniform of sensible heels and church gloves. Socked feet and a slim bootcut jean absent the impulse of trend likewise softened her image.

Barba made sure not to stare--or fool himself--for long. This wasn’t some polite struggle, like Sunday Mass had been. 

This was the rest of his life, as best he hoped to know it. 

Kitty, too, seemed to recognize something had to change. She hadn’t a clue _what,_ but worry made her talkative--it was half the reason she was such an observant Catholic. There was always something terrible to concern herself with, and the promise of an untouchable confession when those thoughts proved too overwhelming. 

She pointed first to the bookshelf, and the man who she’d seen her son smile at and reach a hand for followed with his eyes. He stationed himself partway between where he’d been at the door and where she was at the window: not halving the space between them, but giving as much as he could towards the effort without encroaching on her capacity to do the same. 

“These are his books,” she said in Barba supposed was her normal speaking voice: clear, but quiet. She’d never had to shout over her household; she was revered, or else any silencing was done by Dom, with nary a look.

“Yes,” Barba looked at them all, entirely needlessly. “Though he’s reading one of mine, at the moment.” 

They both heard Kitty’s sharp inhale, and for Barba, it might as well have been a scream. He willed himself not to question having shared that detail--a simple, nothing-comment to suggest their lives, for being lives together, concurrently, touched. Nine words culminated in something somehow overindulgent and profound. 

“He lives here,” Kitty said, a slow and uneasy conclusion. 

“I don’t believe he was keeping that from you,” Barba said, and immediately regretted that he could be seen as confrontational. 

He knew he sounded kind and gentle, but much of it was a result of his exhaustion. To a desperate mother, the point he was making was belligerent on its face. 

The way she proceeded to look around, suspect-- _as if she hadn’t given the place a proper inspection when she first arrived_ \--burned Barba to his core. She was surprised, he concluded. She’d thought the worst, but being invited into the space forced her towards politeness. And the polite thing to think was, her beautiful, wonderful, gentle son was keeping a lonely old man company. 

But that was never the case, and if it could have been, Carisi would have secured himself a place, a corner, an island. He would have spilled himself onto some flat surface, and built his being into the walls. He _wouldn’t_ have incorporated his life with Barba’s, wouldn’t have lived as deeply as he did here.

“This isn’t a projection of homosexuality. This is it. You’re in it.” Had he the heart, Barba might have sold the line for a joke. 

Instead, he sounded worn and weak, like his heart was too small to handle all it was given. It worked too hard and spent itself on a single sprint, nevermind the marathon ahead. 

Barba was made to think of the horror films he’d enjoyed in his youth, the kind that blew fear and torment up into pure adventure. This, he decided, was the moment things came to ahead, where the monster revealed itself and the heroes uprooted themselves from the relative groundedness of their lives. Here, the choice was simple: fight the beast--and in doing so tacitly accept the reality in which it operated--or object, and put one’s faith in a poorly contrived Shyamalan-esque twist.

Barba had never waged a battle so softly.

“This is our life. How it looks, where we go at the end of the day. He cooks and talks incessantly. I work. He helps more than I let him believe because--I’m cruel.” Now more than ever, Barba wished crying was an accessible act; he wished he had license to do so. “He’s made himself happy here. Long before I did, I think. And it feels… wrong without him.” 

Her tight expression made Barba feel ashamed all over again, and for reasons he could identify, if not actively engage with. That she should care that he was scared and hurting, too, was to him like walking hard into a door. Those were his natural steps, yet the end result showed only _his_ folly, never mind that Kitty had been the one to slam the opening shut. He should know better.

He came back around the conversation and collected himself, gathering everything that was true and again throwing it out there. His second attempt was more harried than the first.

“Anyway--yes. Those are his books. There are more, in the bedroom. In a pile. Because he doesn’t think it’s clutter if it’s in a pile.” 

Though for feeling unsteady, Barba continued to stand, thinking if he turned to leave or bent so much as a knee towards making an exit that he’d crumble to the ground. Only Carisi’s presence--which felt all the more real as he named it aloud--kept him upright.

He realized this was his first time alone with Kitty, absent her gaggle of daughters, her steadfast husband, her adoring son. Alone, she was small, almost frail. Though still straight-backed and proud, Barba thought a hard wind could spell her demise. 

Or a misplaced truth.

There were things he wanted her to know, things some mothers would be pleased to hear of their sons. Carisi was kind, generous, righteous. He was an excellent cook, and credited her for that, always. 

Barba wanted to reiterate everything she already knew, and then some. 

Chief amongst all Barba felt she ought to know was that he loved who her son was becoming. The distinction there felt important to him. Every day, Carisi was shifting, maturing, into some more assured shape of a man. This, while Barba felt himself regressing--slightly--towards the giddiness better kept in childhood. It seemed an unfair trade--Carisi made him platefuls of happiness, while Barba brought cynicism to the table, which Carisi tasted only enough of to come away more serious. 

But still, he came to the table.

Between Barba wanting to say something and not, and Kitty thinking something should be said, a steady, rising snore from the guest bedroom was the only interjection. Both parties listened through its length, as though they thought Dom would supply something pertinent by its end. 

“Your home is lovely,” Kitty offered, a delayed, muted response to what slowly dawned on her as propriety. She remembered Barba saying much the same thing to her once, albeit in a far brighter tone.

He’d tried.

He’d been able to try. 

He’d had the strength and peace of mind to put an effort out to the world around him, rather than holding everything tight to that one, fine ideal: that all would be well, and Sonny along with it.

Barba looked at her, relieved. 

“Thank you.” 

“This,” she said of the couch, as if she believed the first statement wasn’t enough and needed clarification. She asked after it, a question held together with chewing gum and string, because there was hardly interest enough in her voice to carry it along. 

Barba rattled off some quiet, overly-detailed answer. His mind strayed instead to the patched and worn pieces he’d grown up with, his mother prideful enough to keep their decade’s old sofa mended and whole, but unwilling--unable--to buy a newer option. She’d tell him, she didn’t like paying for less than a thing’s worth, and places near Jerome Avenue--much less those that wouldn’t laugh outright at the prospect of a delivery--knew by her address alone, she couldn’t _afford_ options. 

Barba’s whole home was options. His life--after Harvard, it must be said--exploded with them. 

He could run his mouth to his heart’s content, and the worst he’d get were a few glares. He could date men as he pleased, without fear that word would get back to his old block. After graduation, he could have his choice of professions, of lucrative firms or high-level contracts. Of the couch Kitty had complimented, Barba had chosen everything from the color, fabric, wood accents, to the shape and shade of the studs holding it all neatly together. He did all this not with glee or excitement or anything of the sort, only a long-awaited confidence that these choices, however minute and fringe, were nonetheless his to make. 

His choices became more pertinent as Barba’s options took in still more variables. When his life doubled itself and became less a running stream of consciousness and more a two-man play, he found greater points of contact in his world--his apartment, his furnishings included. It was where Barba could relax, feel his limbs become heavy and his slacks loosen, and be taken generously into a mouth that only smiled for him, afterwards. Or on nights that did not lend themselves first to the bed, but to its precursor, or those few idle afternoons and tripped-up mornings that led them _only_ there, the couch was where could embrace his lover, engage him gently or--better still--with a kind of fervor that charged and played like lightening between them. They began things in that no-man’s-land that finished spectacularly in the bedroom, but required the open air--a sense of lawlessness--to really get started. 

Alternatively, it was where they landed in exhaustion, taking as little from one another as body heat and solace at the end of a trying day.

Admittedly, Barba didn’t quite know what to do with the compliment chasing after that fact. He couldn’t tell Kitty what he liked best about his home was _her son,_ in it. 

“So, you’ve found the guest room. Uh, towels are in that closet there, I’ll… write down the wifi password,” Barba stopped speaking only for a moment as he searched for a pad of paper and pen. “Ground coffee is in the cabinet above the machine and… is there anything else?” 

Glancing at Kitty, Barba realized he had overestimated things. The way she was looking around, confused and wanting, was not a result if not knowing where he kept the towels. 

“Is there… do you have any questions? Any… at all.”

She turned sharply, regarding him as though she’d forgotten he was there. Pink spread over her cheeks and ears, then receded, as though she’d been caught in a passing beam of red light. 

“Why does he stay here?”

The question, as much as Barba wished he could believe had crawled out from behind the wrong tongue, felt expected. He was almost grateful for its delivery now, early, because at least it would miss him during the latter half of the day, when by that hour he’d feel swollen and heavy with unspent grief. He’d managed to lose a little of it that morning, without meaning to or noticing. His heartache was spread over the whole of Manhattan. 

This gave his heart room to withstand this new hurt, to take it in and answer wisely, not painfully.

“Because he wants to be with me in the most basest terms he knows,” Barba said, giving what he reasoned was his best possible answer, the one closest to the truth. “He wants us to be together.” 

“Why doesn’t he leave?” he guessed, an attempt to suss her true meaning. Ask and answered, he said, “Because I don’t ask him to. Not anymore.” 

He looked down at the granite countertop under his flattened hands. Shimmering flecks amid the glossy white reminded him of Carisi, gamely telling Barba to go all out on slabbed pink when he hummed an interest in redecorating. For every doubt embedded in Carisi’s psyche, he did not project a single one onto others. 

Barba’s armored thinking, it seemed, had the opposite effect.

“We love one another,” he said, quietly drawing himself back to what he knew, and none of what he feared. “I can’t explain it any plainer.” 

_I wish we didn’t._

The pitiful thought, a last bit of torment shot clear through the narrowing pass he’d allowed for it, sound him only briefly. Never passing his lips, it left a vile taste in his mouth. 

Barba shook his head, then, hoping to ward off any response. Even if, by some miracle, his heartfelt answer and haggard disposition swayed her attitudes, he did not wish to hear her first steps towards acceptance. That much was the truth afforded to him by his own sense of pride. But his tightening throat and twisting gut spoke to something more akin to the reason Carisi had for his silence: he knew he could not bear it if she was unmoved. 

He tabled what already felt like a loss and asked tiredly, “Are you hungry? There are leftovers. A recipe of yours, actually.”

“Oh.”

She looked interested, but would not say.

“Please, or else I may keep vigil over a lasagna.” 

Barba fixed her a plate. Lasagna for breakfast, he supposed, wasn’t so outlandish a fixture in the Carisi household. 

“Sonny tends to make his with a fried egg, but that… seems unwise.” 

“Yes,” she said mutedly. “That’s how he likes it.” 

They dined like that: Kitty noting the subtle differences in her own recipe, and Barba, drinking coffee and trying not to let the familiar smell gag him. 

“There aren’t any paintings of men’s…” she dropped so swiftly into a whisper, Barba nearly missed what she said, and wished he had, certainly.

“...genitalia. On the walls.” 

Kitty offered this as an observation, toned as though she expected Barba to look around once before confirming. 

“No, those are in storage with the Christmas decorations,” he said, deciding the lunacy of the sentiment was due in kind. More than embarrassed, he felt bewildered. 

He took stock of himself in that moment: professionally dressed, drinking coffee from a mug with five identical partners aligned just-so in his cabinet, royal-blue socked feet on the hardwood floors of his handsome apartment in so fine a cut of Manhattan that there was a tree outside his window, and passing silence, and then the whole world when he chose to enter it. 

“Do I strike you as the type?” 

“You’re the only one I know.” 

“We both know that’s not true.”

Of course, being smug about not thinking those things _made_ Barba think of those things. Of Carisi, splayed open, had in every way a good Italian housewife might fear. He hoped she couldn’t see it on his face, but some deeper part of him wished for exactly that breed of confrontation. 

_What do you think **isn’t** happening?_

Barba noticed she’d only eat two bites, and perhaps she hadn’t wanted the meal at all, and it only existed as a result their combined desires to engender something concrete between them, to idle around anything other than their words, unspoken and not. Barba fantasized about knocking the plate off the table, giving them an inconsequential mess to exist around. 

But Kitty--perhaps rightfully--held steadfast to Barba’s insinuation. It perched on the bridge of her nose while she refused to make faces staring directly at it. She instead looked through it, through Barba, and spoke resoundingly to the God she’d been speaking to for months on end, it seemed, on the sole topic of her son. 

“I lie. Because of you.” She fit her gaze on Barba, searching him, making her marks as if he’d failed every rubric she’d set. “My friends… people in the church, in the community… they ask about my son and I have to lie.”

Barba surprised himself by feeling hurt. His pride and Carisi’s were no longer abstractions of the mind; Barba very distinctly felt his being tested. 

“Must be awful. For all of a year, too.” He sipped his coffee; perhaps Kitty hadn’t wanted a meal, but Barba lusted for the vigor food and drink afforded him. He wanted to be primed for whatever should befall him in a given day. 

“You should ask your son how he managed for almost two decades.” 

The more he spoke, Barba realized his fury. His tone didn’t rise to engulf his words in spitting flames, but the sentiment did not arrive raw, either. For as long as he’d known the twin sides of Carisi’s excitement and shame, his anger had been gestating. 

“He told me all about it. Being fifteen, and desperate, and _so afraid._

Barba thought he’d say more, even repeat for Kitty the things Carisi had told him in confidence, if only because there was a terrible chance he’d never have to come to absolutely terms with that betrayal. But there was the needling thought that he’d said plenty by just opening that door. Kitty knew what she and Dom had done, and what they’d felt, and how those things informed one another. They’d made choices and accepted the results with further silence and inaction. 

It was a practiced approach. 

“I think perhaps we should leave.”

Kitty said this downward at her plate, as if the lasagna would be first out the door.

“I’m not asking you to,” Barba said, and again thought she hadn’t voiced the question she was holding onto.

“You’re here because he needs you close to him, and I can help facilitate that.” He left the table, coffee in hand, and emptied its last dregs into the sink, a gesture as fluid as simple as his words. “You’re here because that’s what he’d want. And because I love him, I can come to those terms.” 

Barba rounded the space yet again, this time collecting his coat from the narrow hall closet. It was still cold to the touch, but that was of little consequence. The way Barba felt, catching fire just under his skin, made him ache for the freezing brace of winter. 

“This is his home,” Barba told her. In his most absolute terms, he no longer concerned himself with what he could say to make her approve of his character. There was only what was--him, and Carisi, and the dwindling distinctions therein. She could not half-consume Carisi’s identity in the _man’s own home._ Barba _would_ plaster it over the walls, if necessary. 

He said, “You will always be welcome here.” 

He knew in the moment--and ultimately, that was all that he could account for--that all he’d done was upset her. He knew he should regret that, and regret leaving Dom to be told of the encounter absent his point of view. All the progress he’d made there was now subject to her retelling of their conversation, and his departure. Coat laid over his arm, Barba made towards that end.

“Excuse me--I want to give my mother a call.”

He didn’t, really, except to thank her for coming when he’d asked the other day. They’d texted since then, so she was the sole point of contact between himself and the Carisis, outside of Sonny, and he couldn’t very well lie that he was going to give _him_ a call.

“And I think I’ll take a walk, or--go back. To the hospital. To wait.” 

-

When he hit the building’s landing, Barba didn’t tempt the fates by shirking his coat. Taking the stairs two at a time seemed to have settled his ire well enough that he could see reason in the whitened cityscape. It was snowing, briefly. Barba left the building but kept near its slight awning, stealing a long look under a short reprieve.

“Mami, hi.” 

Barba paused to let Lucia exhaust her tried and true line of fret and concern. Even when he was calling her, she was compelled to circle wide around her favorite commentary: that he _never called her._

“No, nothing--not since last night. I went home. I tried to sleep. I’m heading back, now. Soon.” 

His own amended timetable made Barba wince. The truth was, he wasn't certain when he could muster up the courage to return, despite how pressing it felt. 

“What’s--I didn’t ask about your trip, really. Um, how was it?” 

“You don’t care about my trip,” she said, and her attempt at thrusting a laugh into her words only resulted in them coming out breathless. Figuring he was only aching for what was most comfortable and familiar to him, she knew it wouldn’t be forever that he turned to her for that, so she often complied, and was grateful. 

Only, he’d asked as much of her the night before. And she’d spoken softly for hours. 

Granted, he’d been out of sorts, but if she gave an encore performance and it came back to him all the same, she feared he’d feel sullen and embarrassed for his thoughtlessness. Her kindness would only embarrass him. 

She supposed she did have news, things he was not yet privy to, things she hadn’t planned to tell him at all. But--he’d asked.

“The family, you know, the cousins and everyone--they have a, a group chat on the phone. I like it, I get pictures of everyone’s kids, and there’s six different shots of the same sunset every night... “ She could hear him start to drift. 

“I told them what happened,” she said, and suddenly her son was _screaming_ silence. An image struck her--it could have been any of a thousand instances from his childhood, but she remembered this one. He was sat at the kitchen table, head bowed over a textbook, wearing his favorite grey pullover. Her husband there, too, sat caddycorner, with a bottle fit into the curve of his hand. Rafael didn’t greet her, didn’t so much as lift his head. She knew he wasn’t reading; his eyes weren’t scanning the book, but staring through it hard and unblinking. 

Her husband excused her son, and that’s when she saw the heaps of dried blood racing down the front of his shirt. 

When she went to him late that night, he refused to tell her whether it had been the boys at school or his father. He was so deafeningly quiet Lucia was worried perhaps someone had knocked his front teeth in, and he thought he’d get away with hiding it. 

(She’d felt for them when she wiped under his nose with the sleeve of her blouse.)

When her son was _that_ kind of quiet, Lucia knew he was listening. 

“Because,” she started, still of the habit of feeding him excuses, “They asked after you at Christmas, making noises about you being alone. I told them not to worry. I told them you weren’t alone.” 

“...Thanks, mom.”

“Which is to say, they could know.” Lucia paused, expecting something from her argumentative son. If there wasn’t some practical approach she’d missed, it was some principled stance she couldn’t have imagined was theirs to take. He was always surprising her with his indignation as a child. He’d notice the cost of milk had gone up at one bodega but not another, and grumble about it for days. 

There was no glimmer of that, now, and it made her question her approach all over again.

“I hope you don’t mind. They know--that this happened, that we need their prayers.” 

“...It’s okay, mami.” 

Barba sounded strangely at ease, which Lucia found intriguing. She went on to tempt him with his family’s evolving perspective. 

“They’re lighting candles for him in Miami,” she prompted, sighing because in her mind, she still coasting on those warm waters. “At St. Francis de Sales. It was Ramón’s idea.”

She heard a bizarre laugh lift and titter out of him over the phone--like a smattering of pigeons, charged at and dispersed. 

Barba felt strangely uneasy about the whole thing. For one, he couldn’t imagine his family-- _Ramón_ \--engaging in such a gesture. It was far simpler to believe they’d be ambivalent at best. He felt small, particularly young, hearing these things, imagining the scene set by his mother’s rousing words. He was taken back to a time he most wanted it all to be so, which made it a childish wish on its face. 

Barba wasn’t sure of what to do, having been given what he’d wanted. Suddenly he was in his forties, secure in most every facet of his life, only to be palmed the reins to a proverbial pony. All it took was having his heart ripped from his body and thrust into his open hand.

He very nearly turned back around and re-entered his apartment building, his plan being to return to the company kept in his unit, and from them regain a fresh dose of reality. He wanted to be asked, _Where are the dicks on your walls?_

“That’s very… considerate. Please thank them for me.” Barba surprised himself by agreeing with his own sentiment. That quickly gave way to genuine surprise, which he always found was better suited to hang on suspicion. “I’m sorry, I have to go. I think I see Eddie Garcia… Have you been giving out my new address?”

“Just the street.” 

Barba considered that approach in a place like New York. 

“Did you tell him to look for a crack in the sidewalk, or--?”

“Oh, please! You act like I’d _give away your location_ to a band of thieves. This is _Eddie.”_

“Yeah,” Barba hummed, getting a better look now at the bundled figure casing the block. Even the hat and upturned coat collar couldn’t obscure his strong profile, much less share his great, round eyes. “I think it is.”

It was surreal--all these faces, voices, sentiments driving out from the woodwork to corner him in this, his worst possible moment. He wasn’t sure how people kept finding him, how he was even recognized for how lacking in self-confidence he felt. How did the total ruin he felt not play out across his features, turn them inwards and upside down, and in all ways distort him? 

He supposed he couldn’t stop it. This was what kind people did, and Barba had inexplicably surrounded himself by their ranks.

Glancing at his phone again, scrolling through unanswered messages, Barba found one from Ramón. 

It was as promised: _[I hope he pulls thru. I hope u r both ok]_

It was too much. More than Barba wanted to deal with, to acknowledge other peoples’ concerns for him, especially those harbored in spaces that had once been ugly and unkind. He wasn’t ready for the seismic shift. He knew he appreciated their words, but the responsibility to response wasn’t there for him yet, having always feared doing so would rob him of the freewheeling, independent life he’d created.

He supposed there were other ways of losing that. 

_[Thank you]_ he wrote, then deleted it. _Stupid._

_[Thank you, Ramón.]_

A world of difference, in amid uncertain terrain. 

_Eddie,_ though. Eddie was familiar territory.

Barba pocketed his phone. He didn’t wave or rush to meet him; somehow, even in his own neighborhood, he did not want to presume. He leaned against the railing to the stone steps, staring at his phone, or the street, or the sky, absent any purpose. Eddie held no such presumptions; once he spotted Barba he gave a shout, then crossed the street, boots kicking into streaks of wet, discolored snow. 

“Hey, Rafi--!”

Barba felt himself shrink at the concern laid bare on Eddie’s cold-pinched face. It was too much, suddenly, and he found himself throwing an arm back to catch the railing, lest it overcome him. 

Eddie put a hand on Barba, too, meaning to steady him. 

“I heard what happened with your guy.” Eddie’s great, heavy eyes swept over Barba. He searched for any sign that asking at all was the wrong approach. “Jesus Christ. You haven’t answered my calls. I thought…” 

“He’s okay. Going to be. I’m sorry, I just…” Barba tried to steel himself; it wasn’t like this, _he_ wasn’t like this, moments ago on the phone with his mother. He worried his grief could be taken for a show, and dreaded to think what his doorman thought, perhaps seeing the transition from uneasy laughter to quaking. He sucked in a breath, powering through the cold and wet saturating his faculties. 

“Hey. Hey, Rafi… look at me, huh?” 

Barba gave a sharp shake of his head. _No, I will not._ He kept his gaze pinned to the ground beneath his feet, certain if he raised it to meet anything with even a modicum more give, he’d succumb to the softness, the warmth, of any living thing. 

Gently, Eddie asked if Barba wouldn’t prefer to be inside, and joked it would be the polite thing to offer. 

“I’d really rather not. Sonny’s parents are in there,” he said, with grit enough to show he’d done his fair share of _the polite thing._

“I invited them,” he added, in a tone that did little to mask the fact that he wished he hadn’t. 

“Okay, well,” Eddie took the front of Barba’s coat between his hands, and fastened two buttons before Barba remembered himself and swatted Eddie’s hands away, finishing the task himself. “Let’s walk.” 

-

Walking side-by-side with a childhood friend was something almost akin to a dream. Barba had so decidedly left their ranks--first by circumstance, then time--that he feared the opportunity was lost to him. 

But here it was, his secret desire: Eddie, that tall fountain at which to renew himself, a place at which he could drink in that regulated calm of things long passed.

Barba quickly found that wasn’t the case. 

An old friend, the glimpse of their shared past trailing behind in his wake, only served to put Barba’s present heartache into searing perspective. A child’s pain was white-hot and impossible in its happening. Barba still held fast to moments he wasn’t sure he’d gotten free from; they arrested him at the most inopportune times, causing him to look down at his person, assuring himself of a continued existence.

Pain was a different creature for an adult. A cannier villain, it stalked its prey. Barba felt it at his elbow, or stretched long against his back, or as fingers ghosting along his cheek. He hated the teasing. He knew the touch would slowly suffocate him; he wouldn’t be granted the quick dismissal of a snapped neck.

It really was as daunting as he feared. 

For a long time as they carried themselves across city blocks, Barba didn’t step out from his own private thoughts. It was more or less like Eddie was following him, except being tailed in this fashion no longer turned Barba’s stomach. 

_Enough,_ Barba thought. 

He began with formalities, asking after Eddie’s son and mother, waiting just a moment too long before slipping into Spanish that he grimaced when he did, thinking himself a fraud. Eddie answered him easily, as if it was nothing. 

As if their meeting hadn’t started in much the same way.

As if Barba hadn’t seen him out of thirty other children in their grade school classroom, eyes wide and shoulders slumped, the English-speaking teacher’s words falling on deaf ears. As if Barba hadn’t found him hours later after the last bell, and spoken to him in the only language Eddie knew, repeating as best he could what the teacher had said. 

“We can do this everyday,” Barba had offered. Eddie remembered him looking down at his scuffed orange sneakers as other boys passed, then returning his gaze dead ahead after the echo of their jeers and hollers had gone with them. “Or I could help you with your English. Writing and reading.” 

“Y hablando...” Eddie had replied, at last, and in a small and helpless voice that the young Barba only knew in this one memory, because never again was Eddie small in his eyes. 

“Talking is the easy part,” Barba had assured him, and he was smiling, big, like _he’d_ come away the winner, here. 

For his own, Eddie remembered how the panic set in. Nothing good came for free. He’d asked in a rush, _“Can we trade?”_ and thinking fast arrived on, _“Can you ride a bike? I can--”_ It was such a monumental undertaking, Eddie landed on a monumental exchange. _“You can have mine. It’s so fast.”_

Barba shook his head quickly; no, he did not want a fast bike. (He knew the bike wouldn’t be as such, with him on it.) What he did want was an equally terrifying prospect, though he brought himself to ask it in the only language they both spoke.

_Will you be my friend?_

It was a meeting--and a story--they’d never told in full. Barba didn’t know if Eddie was embarrassed for needing so much help, or if he was, as always, protecting Barba from the minute detail that he’d had to ask--even barter--for his first friend. 

For as much of a reputation he got for his propensity to talk, Eddie knew Barba could hold out for an impressive run. Eddie wouldn’t have been surprised if they walked halfway to the South Bronx before Barba reached his breaking point. 

What stalled him, ultimately, was a covert glance at the intersection, and the thought that found him so immediately he couldn’t help but share it. 

“I shouldn't go too far from the hospital,” Barba said.

Eddie took his meaning, narrow though it was. He followed as Barba stopped at a corner, intent on turning them back around.

“Doctors are hopeful though, right? About his recovery?”

Barba gave a stiff shrug of his shoulders. “Hopeful, sure. But they still put pints of strangers’ blood into his body, and a tube down his throat. He looks so awful I can hardly imagine what they’re hopeful _for.”_

His voice hung, then tore itself off the bitter end of that sentiment. Barba swallowed hard, as if the incident left a gaping wound in his mouth, and here he was left to choke down the blood.

“S’just a precaution,” Eddie said, though by the look on Barba’s face, he knew he had no right. “Putting it mildly, I mean. I bet he’s doin’ real good.” Thinking of his mother, Eddie said, “They don’t put it nicely when things have gone to shit.”

“Jesus,” Barba said with a start. It was his saving grace as a lifelong New Yorker that he didn’t stop dead in the street. “You haven't even met him, have you?”

Eddie heard the sadness underpinning Barba’s surprise, the threads of regret strumming deep--buried--in his chest. He tried to smile in spite of it. 

“No, but I used to think I had. Thought if anybody, you’d be doin’ that guapo with the attitude--”

Barba craned his neck, a wordless warning. He wasn’t going to give Eddie the satisfaction of hearing him huffily dispute he’d ever, in his life, harbored a modicum of interest in Detective Nick Amaro.

“--but I look forward to it. He’s gotta be something else if he caught your eye, huh?”

Barba gave a brisk shake of his head; he knew when Eddie was being purposefully kind. It had always embarrassed him when they were young--the bright, open compliments paid with no mind for who else might hear them. Barba wished, now, he hadn’t felt that way. He peacocked about more now than he ever could have dreamed in his youth, but there were so few he could count on to pay him an honest compliment. 

“You're a lot alike.”

“Oh, yeah? Did you teach him English, too?”

“Sadly, no. Not that he couldn't stand to learn.” Barba explained vaguely: “Staten Island…” 

Eddie smiled and laughed, but Barba remained apologetic.

He didn’t set out to hide Carisi from Eddie. The circumstance was more a result of Barba keeping his present self separate from the places and relationships that had formed him. He held within himself two distinct beings, and though it had hurt deeply when Alex said as much, Barba was inclined to agree. The break came in the form of that unimpeachable golden ticket--his ivy league scholarship.

Hands on the heavy envelope, throat thick and stomach twisting with anxiety, and then--like he’d been sliced in two, and one half spontaneously grew whole again, spurred on by bursts of hope and opportunity that never quite took root in the rest of him. The other half tagged along, limping, because he never quite extended his hand to help it along.

He hadn't yet _changed,_ but in that moment he was made entirely _different._

“But really,” Barba said softly. “He reminds me of you.” 

Barba said this and did not feel compelled to apologize in advance, should a comparison to his lover make his friend uncomfortable. Eddie had always loved everything Barba did, and with little fanfare, that extended to everything he was. 

Barba was proven right when Eddie gestured to his face--complete with lopsided-dimples--and joked, “He really this good lookin’?”

“He's a good man,” Barba clarified. “He’s kind. To a fault.”

“Oh yeah? Sounds like you.”

Barba snorted. 

“He’s smarter than he knows.”

“Yeah, no, that ain’t you.” The big, broad grin that lifted his features was more a step backwards into the past than any real-time appreciation of good humor. He smiled like that now for having _always_ smiled like that for Barba. “You know exactly how smart you are.”

The line was meant to lighten and lift his spirit, but in the great, roiling mess that was Barba’s psyche--not only as a result of the previous day, but weeks now, months, _years_ \--he misconstrued it, taking it forwards and back in time, making lateral moves on an infinite plane with its application. 

“I'm sorry,” he said in a rush. “Growing up, if I made you feel stupid. Ever. Even once. I'm sorry.” 

Eddie was quiet, then, and contemplative of every lovesick misdeed, every failure, every hurdle he took over a subway grate in clear view of a cop, of the things in life to which he limited himself. Each memory bombarded him until they started to reflect one another, and ultimately stood as one glaring truth.

Not fully knowing English well into fourth grade was by far the least of it. 

“Rafi, I _was_ stupid.”

There was that smile again, tilted like a ship on some sun-blasted horizon, making Barba wonder why he never fell for Eddie like he had for Alex, and what that might have saved him. 

“But nothing you ever did or said made me feel bad about it.” 

Eddie’s smile settled into a thin line. 

“And you know that,” he said, as much a challenge as he would ever lob at Barba.

It bowled him over. Barba supposed he was a sucker for firsts. 

Gently, and in a tone Eddie would swear up and down that Barba taught him right along with compound sentence structure, the tone Eddie used to speak with his _son_ when he needed Manny to understand something deeply unfair, Eddie made a promise.

“You’re gonna talk to him again. And when you do, he’ll want these apologies fresh.” 

Barba, too terrified to admit he was scared, settled on admitting he was doubtful. 

“His family got to see him for--maybe ten minutes? Twenty? Up close. I was outside his room. I stared just expecting him to… come alive.”

He dug his hands a little further into his pockets, even for any wind that might have found them being shunted off by buildings. 

“Longest ten-to-twenty minutes of my life,” Barba muttered, except maybe it wasn’t, if he thought any harder about it. He remembered the summer he was nursing a broken arm, and somewhere out of petulance and a genuine fear of seeing the other boys half-naked at the City pool, had laid himself up in his family’s sweltering apartment. He remembered lying flat on the wood floor, sucking up whatever cool air passed over him from the small, portable classroom fan Eddie had liberated from the school for the summer. Late in the afternoon Alex had come up to the apartment, hair stinking of chlorine and skin warmed over by the bikeride home. He’d laid next to Barba, shirtless, his trunks hiding nothing, for a good ten-to-twenty minutes before declaring, _Rafi, you missed it. Yelina has a two-piece now._

In the coming silence, Barba shifted, moved ahead of Eddie and began to lead their walk. They fast arrived back within a block of the hospital, and Eddie showed no signs of wanting to peel off.

He put his arm around Barba’s shoulders and tucked them in through the rush of cold air caught between the automated double doors. 

Eddie asked what floor Carisi was on, and when Barba answered Eddie prompted, as if he hadn’t heard, _so show me._

“We probably can’t see him,” Barba said in the elevator, and again when they’d arrived at Carisi’s floor, and taken the coiled snake of a route to a small u-shaped waiting area amidst a silent string of private rooms. 

“You were coming here anyway to, what, wait? So we’ll wait.” 

“They’re only going to let family--”

Barba didn’t get to finish his thought; Eddie had already introduced himself to a hawk-eyed nurse as Barba’s brother, and intimating quick that they were going to have a seat. Barba didn’t need telling that Eddie had spent months in the hospital when his mother’s health took a turn. Eddie had always been a bit of a charmer, and smart in the ways of getting around in the world. He took care to be kind, and treated every passing meeting like a would-be whirlwind love affair. There was just the hint of it, only. Just a smile composed enough to leave the viewer wondering what it was all for, never realizing they’d already been swindled of their compliance. 

“Brother, huh?” Barba paid his coat over the back of his chair and sat only after Eddie did, still reticent to having lead his friend here. 

“You want to go and correct me?” Eddie asked, lifting his chin to indicate the nurse who was very pointedly _not_ giving them the third degree. “I know… a lot of shit went down, but we used to be. Brothers. The three of us.” 

Barba sucked in a breath so cold, he might have held it from when they were outside. 

And, like much of what found its way over his tongue and past his lips, Barba had no earthly understanding of what or _why_ he said what he did, next. 

“Alex and I weren’t always… entirely brotherly.” 

It took a moment to resonate with Eddie, because perhaps he really was that sweet a soul.

But then his mouth twisted up, and broke open, and Barba saw that wild grin that seemed to bookend every bad decision he’d ever made as a child. That grin chased him down stolen subway rides, through bad neighborhoods, and ran circles around bad dates. 

“Rafi,” he said, an honorific. “Rafi you _slut._ ” 

Two in one breath. Barba should be proud. 

“I was so completely in love with him,” Barba said, pride the farthest thing from his mind. It went both ways for him: he’d let visions of his and Alex’s shared past muddy his understanding of the man he’d become, just as the inky black reality seeped in and discolored the golden memory.

Everything, he realized-- _everything good he’d ever had_ \--was ruined by his own hand. 

Time and experience had no bearing. The end result was already set.

Realizing as much only now, so late in his life, utterly helpless to undo his patterns, made Barba want to cry. 

That desire welled up in his throat but went no further. It soaked into his words, leaving his eyes raw and wanting for the moisture. 

**_“I_** was stupid, Eddie.”

More than distraught, Barba looked _scared._ Here was the culmination of all his good work: piecemeal loss culminated in a life dangling from a precipice. A man he loved, whose very existence was uncertain, even as the distance between them was less than a generous city block. Barba couldn’t see that far, or beyond. 

His vision was swimming, and Barba sank like a stone.

-

To say Barba fell asleep would be too kind.

Exhaustion came in, swept him up, and stole him down corridor after narrow corridor. He collapsed in its arms, and might have dangled inelegantly, were it not for the stiff arms of the chair he was sat in, and Eddie’s shoulder, offered like a concession. 

Eddie remembered Barba falling asleep in high school--usually on afternoons they would hang out, few as they were as Barba preoccupied himself with his studies. They’d be in Alex’s car sometimes when he’d drift, and his head would lob like a bodega cat’s as he searched for warm sunlight through stickered-over windows.

So Eddie did then what he did now: kept still, kept quiet, and let his smart-mouthed, tired-eyed, bruise-wearing friend know some fleeting moments of peace.

What Eddie refrained from doing was elbow Barba awake like he’d done when they stopped for the neighborhood girls, asking after any parties. It would only embarrass him, if Barba snored when he could have been smooth-talking. 

Seeing Lieutenant Benson approach from down the hall, every bit the officer of the law, no matter how concerned she wore her face, Eddie kept still. He rightly figured the situations weren’t so compatible. 

“Any news?” 

Benson spoke quietly as she took the empty seat next to Eddie, hoping to excuse Barba from their shared waking nightmare for just a moment longer. Eddie did much the same, lowering his voice as well as turning away from Barba--at least, as best he could, given that he’d slung his arm around the back of the man’s seat, and Barba’s cheek was resting warm on his hand. 

“No ma’am.” 

Benson didn’t offer her name or attempt to mollify his inclination towards what was proper. Maybe he was Barba’s closest friend, once, but that was her title, now, _her_ responsibility. Eddie Garcia was a memory for, not an authority on, Rafael Barba. 

It didn’t help that she’d once had her detectives arrest him, either. 

They sat in silence for a time, each concentrating--but neither remarking--on Barba’s steady breathing. There was some shared concern that he’d just stop, as though there was no coming back from the pits of _this_ exhaustion, or that he’d ever go so quietly. But even for sleeping, he did not look well: the dark circles under his eyes, ever-present, distinguished themselves on a wane and hungry face. His unshaven jaw and upper lip encircled a chewed-upon mouth. Barba often looked like he was dying to say something, but that was a matter of withholding his faculties for the most opportune moment.

It was rare that he did not have the words, or searched so hard for them in vain. 

His friends could picture him pulling his own teeth next, taking the excavating game to the next level. And worse, they’d believe it just as well as he: the words had to be there.

“You want I should wake him up?” Eddie asked, glancing at the badge hanging about her neck like he expected she’d make it an order.

Benson, ready to answer in the negative, never got the chance. Barba shifted--a hand rising to meet his face, wiping his cheek before contracting and fitting itself at the bridge of his nose. There he held himself together and took the plunge back into wakefulness. 

“I’m up, I’m up--” His voice was thick, and carried on being so until he’d fully opened his eyes. “Any news?” 

He blinked and looked around, unfocused still but certain he’d glom on to something obvious enough. A celebratory fistful of balloons or a funeral procession, perhaps. 

His friends’ silence answered his query. 

Barba sighed and rubbed his brow. He caught Benson--her head ducked, always, in barely-veiled intrigue--glancing up at him. 

“I made it home,” he said, remembering how they’d last left things. “How’s Noah?”

“Ecstatic that Jesse’s staying over.”

Barba does the calculations, there. 

“How’s Rollins?”

Barba hadn’t forgotten that other people loved Carisi, that other people could come apart for knowing him, and seeing him, in such a dismal state. He supposed his bent towards empathy and understanding was skewed in a very distinct direction. 

Benson’s weak shrug broke his heart anew.

“How are _you?_ ”

He whispered those words, but neither believed the sentiment for a mystery. Both Barba and Benson knew she felt tremendous, unanswerable guilt, and however sad she was, however concerned for her Detective’s wellbeing, it didn’t count as much as that.

Eddie, who was positioned between the two, set a hand on Barba’s knee. 

“Hey, hermano. Give me your apartment keys.”

“Excuse me?”

“Te cocinaré algo.” 

Barba sighed. “...Eddie.”

“Don’t think I never knew you had groceries delivered when my mom…” Neither of them had to finish their sentiments to have them be known fully by one another. 

Eddie stood up, gathered his coat.

“Call your butler or whatever--”

“Doorman.”

“--So I don’t add to my arrest record tryin’ to do you any favors.” 

“Don’t burn the place down.” They locked eyes a moment, both men offering assurances towards the real request Barba had in that regard--that he’d hold off, if he could, until the Carisis passed through. “Thanks, Eddie.” 

For as mixed as his feelings were in seeing Eddie trudge up the wet sidewalk to his apartment, Barba decided he was by no means confused watching Eddie go. There was a definite ache in his side, something old and familiar, urging him to follow. To go with Eddie promised safety, always, even if Barba forgot from time to time. 

Then it was just Benson and Barba, and an empty seat between them.

In the cold light of day, some time removed from the incident, sat in plush chairs in such a nice enclave, treated as known entities, and purposefully placed, there was time to breathe, to think, to dig deep into those quiet recesses of the human spirit. 

Benson hadn't but brushed the surface with the flat of her hand when she asked, “Do you blame me, Rafael?”

She looked at him as she asked, seeing her friend for tightly wound and torn loose with exhaustion. He didn't move, didn’t start, didn’t open his mouth for the objection she’d hoped was at the ready. 

That he couldn’t regard her warmly at once shut her out entirely into the bitter cold. 

And when he finally spoke, Benson felt another icy wind cut through her.

“You might prefer the answer I’m inclined to give if I couldn’t see that badge.” 

Neither spoke again, and though she glanced down at the badge hanging from her throat, the one she’d worked her entire life to attain and uphold, Benson could not tuck that part of herself away, even at her dear friend’s request. It wasn’t a matter of pride; she didn’t think it was fair to excuse that part of her.

“This keeps happening,” Barba murmured, the expression no longer taut like it might have been, years ago. It was made slack now by gruelling repetition.

There wasn’t a day in recent memory Barba could excise that fact from his consciousness. If it wasn’t demonstrated outright, it was memorialized, or marred in the papers, or closed down a street in the city, or else crossed his desk. 

“I won’t ask if your testimony would change, now. I know it would.” Barba felt his heart throb painfully in his chest, imagined his throat flooding with pumps of blood flowing errantly from their source. “I suppose that’s what I have a problem with.” 

He didn’t dare look at her, knowing how hurt she’d be. Cowardice was his birthright at this point, no matter how brave his anger made him feel. 

Barba was never more like his father than when he was cornered by those he loved. 

Benson was shaking. In her response, her voice quaked and gave way to every miserable pit. She was pock-marked as streets in a war-torn city, the blast zones too frequent to avoid. She went deeper and deeper; she used to believe anger and guilt were tools she could use to vindicate herself. The only tool she seemed to have was a shovel. 

“I care about my people, Rafael--”

He cut her off there with a noise not unlike a wretched sob. And he looked at her, finally, angry that someone he knew to be brilliant was suddenly so obtuse, scared that perhaps he had put his trust where it could never be truly safe, and determined, above all else, to wound. 

“He’s not _your people,_ he’s _mine._ ” 

His eyes searched hers; he was begging for a retraction, and from there, some means to end this line of thought. Barba did not want to say what was only there to be said, did not want to put so fine a point on the desperation he now shared, by virtue of Carisi harboring so much. There was runoff, spillover, the kind Carisi couldn't contain on his worst nights, spent in stinging wakefulness amidst pockets of nightmares. The kind, perhaps worse, that clung to him like day-old sweat even in their happier moments. The kind that was slowly changing all the parts that had once been untouchable. 

Barba had felt it under his hands, tasted it on his tongue. Even to spare a friend, he would not surrender a good man’s light.

“The hours, _the work._ He can’t… he’s not the type of person to turn any of it off. It’s taking too great a toll, and you know that.” His tone fast turned vindictive. “He was good enough to give as much as himself as he has. He’s going through the same things as you, and he doesn’t have twenty years of experience to deal with it all. You--you of all people… should know.” 

“What don’t I know, Rafael.”

_“You can't take everything, Liv.”_

The sentiment, though curt, held every subsequent misgiving Barba might have spent hours going through by hand. It gripped his meager annoyance for the calls that hauled Carisi out of a warm bed, as well as his own shame that Carisi was never lead on the cases Benson thought it prudent to have Barba prosecute. It careened into the fact that Barba still felt uneasy about being a known entity, and for as long as he worked with SVU, and Carisi for it, they were demonstrably that. 

Which tracked to the simple and undeniable truth that Carisi would _conceivably_ leave if not for Benson telling him--by virtue of their shrinking rank and file--that she needed him. The grievances piled up from there: He might be further along in his career, he might be well-rested, he might not have nightmares, he might not have been the one to take the call. 

He might have been anywhere else.

“I’m sorry,” Barba said, the reality of lobbing accusations at one of his dearest friends sinking him like a stone. He watched her above him, the one bright spot amidst the encroaching darkness. “I didn’t mean… that.”

“You did.”

Benson didn’t seem at all surprised, which hurt Barba all the more. 

“I shouldn’t have said it.” Barba amended, and reasoned by the softening expression on her face that she’d already forgiven him, that she was ever the more emotionally grounded person than he, and the things he found fault with in Carisi’s life were nearer his problems than hers. “I know he doesn’t get through this without you. I know _I_ won’t. Liv.” 

She nodded her acquiescence, but Barba knew the sting had not gone, that the one sure way to stifle the fight in her was to wound her heart, and he’d done so with terrible purpose.

“If it’s any comfort, I blame myself more than I blame you.” 

“You think you could have pushed him out?”

“If I’d bothered to really try,” Barba mused, “Absolutely.” 

“He’s a good detective.”

“I don’t care,” Barba said, and bitterness tightened his throat such that he couldn’t finish his thought: _He’s a good man._

Benson finally moved to the seat beside him, taking his hand in hers as she did. She knew.  
His face contorted, but he did not cry. His inadequacy here, he decided in that moment, was cowardice.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, grateful now for her persistence. Her grip was more certain than his own, to start, but he felt himself clinging for dear life. 

“I'm sorry too,” Benson said, and cried. 

He let her, and as he held her hand through the slight convulsions instigated by that innermost part of her soul that reached her body, that part Barba didn’t seem to have, he wished he could join her ranks. She didn’t indulge for long--Barba thought, so as to not make him jealous. Perhaps she knew he was deficient in this way. 

“You know,” she swallowed, bearing everything back down again, “When… Mike.”

She opened her hand, palm up, to what was laid out before them. _When Mike was here, when we lost Mike, when I was guilty of exactly what you said I was…_

“I waited. I stayed. The only thing that got me out of the hospital was Carisi… asking about you.” 

_Heredio,_ Barba thought. _And the officers’ backing his play ahead of their own._

“He said… and it’s stuck with me,” she swallowed again, hard, as the memories of such a tumultuous year pressed down on her, “That you were under surveillance at your apartment, under protest. I thought perhaps you were being principled.” 

The corner of her mouth twitched in appreciation of what might have been a joke they could have enjoyed, were they in less dire straits. 

“But Carisi told me you’d asked to come to the hospital, to be with the rest of us. To stay. To wait.”

“That’s a lie,” Barba murmured. He liked the junior Dodds well enough--though his guilty conscience would tell him _not by much_ \--but his concern had always been Benson. “I only wanted to be at your side.”

“Then,” Benson corrected. The word squeezed out of her throat, and gasped for air on the other side. For Benson, who had cultivated a scant few close relationships with the men in her life, losing her place in the line of succession would always hurt, even for knowing better.

“Then,” Barba agreed. And since they were spilling secrets in an attempt to give cause to how bad they felt, Barba continued, “I didn’t really care about him, then. Even for… flirting, for awhile.” Barba could admit it had a name, now, given its end result. “I didn’t care until I got something I wanted from him.”

“I don’t believe that,” Benson said, and had the strength to laugh through the sentiment. Barba looked up, hopeful she had something there, something tangible she could turn over to him as proof of the standing he’d thought he’d gained in his own life. “I know I disappointed you during the Terrance Reynolds grand jury. I know I wasn’t the only one.”

“I can be disappointed in people I don’t care about. I’m exceedingly judgmental.”

“You were hurt, too,” Benson pointed out. “Six weeks, you refused to have drinks with us at Forlini's.”

“‘Refused,’” Barba repeated, mockingly, because he didn’t have any other word for it, and couldn’t be forced to lie to her face.

“I’m being generous if I say all Carisi did in the interim was _mope._ Very generous.”

“I’m not saying there wasn’t something between us,” Barba huffed, though the thought met him surprisingly delicately, and for that he could not name it aloud: _Longing._ He wiped at his nose, brushed the flat of his palm against his cheek and under his eye, begging tears, begging sentiment to take him to that same dismal place the rest of him had gone, all memory and cold, dark earth.

“I’m saying I was too self-righteous to care.”

He was startled to glance at her and find she was smiling, even amid her glassy eyes and smudged mascara. 

“Hear what you’re saying, Rafael. You’re better for taking that leap. For knowing him, however it started.”

Barba looked at his shoes laid against the floor tiling. Perhaps the coloring looked fine, almost pleasant. Perhaps he knew pleasant from deafening, anymore. 

“I knew that,” he said, a whisper. Cowardice seeped out of him by the minute. 

Benson brought her free hand to cover the one she already held of Barba’s, to encase him fully, and leave no room for his escape. He might want, desperately, to abandon all others when he felt as much was being done to him. Benson knew the feeling. She’d learned it, in fact, by Barba’s example.

“And now you’ve said it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler: I told my bud Slash--y I wanted to end the fic and kill Carisi, and she said "lol no," so that's where we're at.


End file.
